When Recovery Fails, So Does Everything Else

Every CTO and engineering leader understands the importance of digital resilience, the ability of systems to absorb disruption and continue operating. But resilience is only as strong as your ability to recover.

Recovery is the real test.

When systems fail to come back online quickly and cleanly, resilience becomes theatre. Recovery failures don’t just cost downtime, they erode trust, burn out teams, and threaten the future of the organisation.

The Hidden Cost of Failed Recovery

Most organisations have recovery mechanisms in place. Some have never needed them. Others have learned the hard way that they don’t always work. Recent research by Cockroach Labs found that 100% of organisations surveyed experienced revenue loss due to outages in the past year, with costs ranging from $10,000 to over $1 million.

When recovery fails:

• Operations grind to a halt.
• Customer trust evaporates.
• SLAs are breached.
• Internal morale suffers.
• Shadow IT grows.
• Technology estates fragment.
• Business growth stalls.

What starts as a technology issue quickly becomes an existential crisis.

How to Avoid Recovery Failure

A recovery plan is essential, but it’s not enough. You need to test, validate, and evolve your recovery strategy to ensure it works when it matters most.

1. Are recovery processes tested regularly?

1. Maintain a documented testing schedule (e.g. quarterly or biannually)
2. Run both planned and surprise failover exercises
3. Track outcomes and follow-up actions
4. Involve cross-functional teams to simulate real-world conditions

2. Are RTO/RPO defined per service?

1. Set Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for each critical service
2. Align targets with business expectations
3. Include RTO/RPO in SLA documentation
4. Monitor compliance and review annually

3. Are postmortems done and tracked?

1. Conduct postmortems for all major incidents and near misses
2. Use a standard template to capture root cause, impact, and mitigation
3. Assign ownership for follow-up actions
4. Analyse recurring themes to drive systemic improvements

4. Can you recover from vendor failures?

1. Identify critical third-party dependencies
2. Establish backup vendors or alternate solutions
3. Include vendor outages in continuity simulations
4. Ensure data portability and platform interoperability

5. Do teams rehearse incident roles?

1. Run incident response drills (e.g. tabletop exercises, war games)
2. Document roles and responsibilities in playbooks
3. Rotate roles to build redundancy
4. Debrief and improve after each exercise

Recovery Leaders: Who’s Getting It Right?

Netflix: Chaos Engineering and auto-healing systems

Shopify: Feature flags and rollback safety

Slack: Transparent incident coordination and public postmortems

Google SRE: Recovery as a discipline with budgets and automation

Starling Bank: Multi-AZ architecture and rehearsed failovers

Recovery Is a Leadership Discipline

Failure is inevitable. Recovery is not.

When recovery fails, it’s not just a system flaw—it’s a leadership failure. Make recovery a core part of your engineering culture and technology strategy.

Ask yourself: “What if this were real?”

How can Axiologik help?

Axiologik empowers organisations to strengthen their operational resilience by first assessing recovery maturity, benchmarking RTO/RPO targets and resilience practices to identify gaps. We facilitate guided simulations, such as fire drills, to uncover blind spots in tooling and communication workflows. Our approach prioritises designing for resilience over reactive hope, helping you build strategic roadmaps for automation, architecture modernisation, and vendor alignment.

Finally, we turn incidents into catalysts for improvement through structured postmortems and leadership coaching, driving continuous learning and lasting change across your teams.

If you're a CTO or engineering leader ready to strengthen your recovery posture, let’s talk. Together, we’ll ensure your systems—and your organisation—are ready for the failures that will inevitably come.