Ever hear about a company that found out their backups were corrupt after they’d lost their main database, or the keys they needed to interact with their systems were inaccessible when those systems were down? Mistakes like this cost money, time, and reputation.

If you don’t practise your disaster recovery processes before you need to use them then you don’t know if they are going to work. (This of course assumes you have a disaster recovery process in the first place!)

You should address the most likely and most costly risks first. Some things are out of your control. E.g., an important partner API sending new responses that are crashing your systems. You can still have a plan for how you’ll handle that so you’re not scrambling and inventing on the fly.

At a recent conference a speaker asked for a show of hands for “Who knows how to use a fire extinguisher?” which prompted this post. That’s a good skill to learn if you don’t have it already too!