Disaster Recovery for OT/ICS: A Plan Is Incomplete Without Drills
In OT/ICS environments, a Disaster Recovery plan is never proven by documentation alone. It becomes credible only when validated through controlled drills. Recovery order must be explicit for SCADA nodes, historian databases, license services, and recipe management systems, including dependencies and startup sequence. Without this clarity, real incidents force teams into conflicting priorities, and valuable time is lost before meaningful restoration begins.
Drill realism is the key quality factor. Instead of testing only a single host failure, combine scenarios such as segment-level network loss, storage corruption, identity service disruption, or remote access outage. Participation must extend beyond IT to operations, maintenance, quality, and cyber security representatives. If decision flow is not tested under pressure, technical recovery may still succeed while production restart remains delayed and poorly coordinated.
Measurement discipline should be standardized for every exercise: detection time, escalation time, approval latency, restoration duration, and safe return-to-production interval. Compare outcomes against defined RTO/RPO targets and perform root-cause analysis for every deviation. Reporting only what worked gives a false sense of readiness; documenting bottlenecks and delays is what drives substantial improvement in the next recovery cycle.
Each drill must end with runbook updates as a mandatory deliverable. Contact trees, privileged access paths, backup location references, approval gates, and rollback logic must be revised before the plan is considered current. Organizations that adopt frequent, progressively realistic exercises achieve stronger audit posture and, more importantly, execute with calmer and more consistent control during real disruptions.
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