How often should we test breach-ready DR?

Quarterly, minimum. Alternate between tabletop and full restore to a clean room. Include identity/key rotation in at least one drill per year.

What if immutable backups slow down restores?

Use tiered backups: frequent incremental snapshots for speed, periodic immutable copies for safety. Practice both. Your RTO-C should account for verification time, not just restore time.

Can we skip GitOps for the clean room?

You can, but you’ll reinvent it. GitOps gives you declarative, repeatable state, drift detection, and a clean audit trail. In a breach, you want zero manual snowflakes.

Which tools do auditors actually accept as evidence?

Signed policy reports (OPA/Kyverno), IaC plans, SBOMs and image signatures (cosign/in-toto), backup retention configs, and posture queries (steampipe). The key is immutability and provenance—sign and store on WORM.

Security-compliance · Oct 9, 2025 · 9 minute read

Your DR Plan Won’t Save You From a Breach (Unless You Do This)

Most DR runbooks assume failed disks and bad deploys. Breaches behave differently. Here’s how to turn policies into guardrails, checks, and automated proofs—without turning delivery into molasses.

Alex Mercer

Principal Architect, GitPlumbers

20 years shipping and salvaging systems across fintech, health, and SaaS. Former SRE lead at a unicorn that learned the hard way that DR without security is theater.

If your DR plan doesn’t start with isolation and end with auditable proof of cleanliness, it’s theater.

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Your DR Plan Won’t Save You From a Breach (Unless You Do This)

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist