Disaster Recovery Runbooks: Why Testing Makes or Breaks Your Plan

Having a disaster recovery (DR) plan is essential. But if it’s never been tested, it’s little more than a Word document. In finance, downtime can cost thousands per hour in missed trades, not to mention reputational and regulatory damage.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) stresses the importance of testing incident response and continuity plans to ensure resilience (NCSC – Incident Management).

Why Testing Matters

• Financial impact: An outage in trading hours can result in immediate and significant losses.
• Compliance: Regulators such as the FCA expect firms to demonstrate tested continuity measures. (FCA Operational Resilience Guidance)
• Team readiness: Employees need to practise recovery steps under pressure so they can act quickly when it matters.

Best Practices for Testing

1. Test annually at a minimum: Complex systems evolve quickly, annual tests keep plans current.
2. Simulate realistic threats: Test against scenarios such as ransomware, a trading platform outage, or total data centre loss.
3. Review, learn, and adapt: After each test, refine your runbook to fix gaps and improve response.

At Maple, we don’t just write DR runbooks, we help finance firms put them to the test. Our team runs scenario-based exercises, works alongside your staff, and produces compliance-ready reports to satisfy auditors and regulators.

A plan that hasn’t been tested is a plan that won’t hold up in real life. With Maple’s support, you’ll have confidence your DR strategy works when you need it most.