Disaster recovery used to live in a binder.
A plan. A diagram. A set of assumptions everyone hopes will hold when the worst happens. But enterprise systems don’t fail politely anymore. Outages ripple across regions, dependencies, and teams. Migrations introduce new fragility. Compliance pressure adds deadlines. And in an AI-shaped landscape, availability isn’t just a technical goal, it’s part of trust.
The uncomfortable truth is that most organisations don’t really know whether their disaster recovery plan works. They know it exists. They know it was reviewed. They may even know it passed a tabletop exercise. But until you run a realistic failover test at scale, “prepared” is still a theory.
That gap between planning and proof is exactly what Gremlin’s Disaster Recovery Testing (DRT) is designed to close.
Why Traditional Disaster Recovery Testing Falls Short
Most disaster recovery planning starts from a good place. It’s cautious. It’s structured. It’s designed to prevent panic when something breaks. The problem is that traditional approaches often stop right before the point where confidence becomes real.
Tabletop exercises are a classic example. They’re useful because they surface process problems: who calls who, who approves what, where escalation gets stuck. But tabletop testing doesn’t prove that systems will fail over cleanly. It doesn’t prove that dependencies are mapped correctly. It doesn’t prove that your runbooks match reality.
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum: real-world failover testing. The kind that actually validates zone evacuations, region failover, and datacentre resilience.
That’s where organisations hit the wall.
Large-scale failover testing is hard to coordinate, risky to run, and expensive in engineering hours. It often requires multiple teams to be on standby, manual checks to confirm what’s healthy, and a lot of careful sequencing so the test itself doesn’t become the outage.
So tests get delayed. Or reduced in scope. Or run so rarely that they stop reflecting the environment you have today.
And when cloud outages do happen, you find out in public what your internal testing never proved.
This is why operational resilience can’t be treated as a once-a-year checkbox. Business continuity depends on repeatable proof, not best intentions.
What Is Disaster Recovery Testing By Gremlin
Gremlin is a proactive reliability platform built by engineers who helped pioneer Chaos Engineering at Netflix and Amazon. But Disaster Recovery Testing isn’t just “chaos, only bigger.”
It’s a product built specifically to help organisations safely and efficiently test the scenarios that matter most for business continuity: zone, region, and datacentre evacuations and failovers.
At a high level, Gremlin Disaster Recovery Testing (DRT) gives enterprises a way to:
- Simulate the impact of major outages across their digital infrastructure
- Validate that failover systems behave the way leadership expects them to
- Identify weaknesses early, so remediation happens before a real incident forces it
- Produce detailed reliability reports that support governance, planning, and accountability
It’s designed to surface risk, not create damage. That distinction matters. For many teams, the biggest barrier to realistic disaster recovery testing isn’t a lack of will. It’s the fear that a test could trigger the very disruption it’s meant to prevent.
DRT’s value starts with making large-scale testing safer, faster, and easier to run as a normal operational practice.
How Gremlin Enables Safe, Large-Scale Disaster Scenarios
Disaster recovery testing only builds confidence if it resembles reality. That usually means larger blast radiuses, more moving parts, and more ways for hidden dependencies to show up.
DRT is built to handle that complexity without turning testing into a bespoke engineering project every time.
Testing at the scale real disasters demand
Catastrophic events don’t isolate themselves to one service. A region outage doesn’t politely impact only your frontend. It tests your network paths, your data layers, your identity systems, your observability tooling, and every brittle integration you forgot existed.
Gremlin’s approach is built around organisation-wide testing from a central command centre. That matters because it changes who can run the test, how consistently it can be repeated, and how easily results can be compared over time.
Instead of a fragmented, team-by-team exercise, you can run datacentre-scale tests across your cloud infrastructure and enterprise systems with one coordinated view of what happened.
Practically, that means less manual orchestration, fewer side-channel updates, and fewer blind spots created by teams testing in isolation. It also means testing can be treated like a discipline, not a heroic event.
Built-in safety mechanisms that protect production systems
Realistic failover testing has always carried a psychological cost. Even when you’ve done everything right, there’s a quiet fear in the background: what if the test pushes something over the edge?
Gremlin addresses that with enhanced safety measures designed to protect system integrity during testing. Health checks can automatically halt tests and return services to a healthy state.
That’s not just a technical feature. It’s what makes disaster recovery testing possible as a repeatable operational habit. Safety mechanisms reduce the risk of runaway tests, but they also reduce the organisational friction around testing. Teams are more willing to run large-scale scenarios when the platform is built to stop and stabilise, not just disrupt.
In other words, DRT isn’t asking enterprises to be reckless. It’s giving them a controlled way to validate resilience without gambling on uptime.
From Engineering Exercise To Business Continuity Proof
If disaster recovery testing stays trapped inside engineering language, it stays trapped inside engineering budgets. It becomes something leadership supports in principle, but struggles to prioritise when everything else is on fire.
DRT changes the conversation because it produces outcomes that business leaders can understand.
One of the clearest signals is visibility. Tests don’t just run, they generate a clear record of what passed, what failed, and what needs investigation. That becomes the start of a measurable resilience story, instead of a vague sense of comfort.
Reliability reports also change what remediation looks like. When you can identify weaknesses and prioritise fixes based on evidence, disaster recovery planning becomes more targeted. Less guesswork. Less “we should probably improve this one day.” More concrete decisions about where risk actually lives.
This is where business continuity becomes real. Not as an aspiration, but as proof you can show internally.
And it matters now. In the press release announcing DRT, Gremlin points to multiple high-profile cloud outages in 2025, including an AWS us-east-1 zone outage in October 2025 that impacted 70,000 companies and was estimated to cause $581 million in losses. When an event has that scale, resilience stops being an internal technical concern. It becomes a business risk with a visible price tag.
Supporting Compliance, Reporting, And Executive Accountability
Business continuity is about more than uptime. For many organisations, it’s also about scrutiny.
Regulators, auditors, investors, and boards increasingly want to know what resilience looks like in practice. “We have a plan” isn’t enough when risk disclosures are on the line.
Gremlin’s reporting capabilities are positioned to support that reality with reports that can assist scaling companies in proving digital resilience in S-1 filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Those reports can also support public companies in creating 10-K annual filings that detail operations and risks, offering a structured overview of proactive reliability efforts.
It’s important to be precise about what this means. Tools don’t guarantee compliance. They don’t replace legal review. But they do make it easier to produce evidence. And evidence is what turns resilience from an internal claim into something you can defend in formal reporting.
This is where executive accountability shifts. When resilience is measurable and reportable, it’s no longer a vague operational goal. It becomes part of governance.
Who Disaster Recovery Testing Is Designed For
Disaster Recovery Testing by Gremlin is clearly aimed at organisations where downtime is expensive, complexity is unavoidable, and assumptions are dangerous.
That usually looks like:
- Large enterprises operating across regions, availability zones, or cloud providers. The bigger the environment, the harder it becomes to prove disaster readiness through manual coordination alone.
- Organisations facing external scrutiny. IPO preparation, audit cycles, and investor-facing reporting raise the stakes for provable resilience. Being confident isn’t enough. You need to be able to demonstrate why.
- Teams that can’t afford one-off heroics. If disaster recovery testing depends on a handful of people with tribal knowledge and calendar luck, it’s fragile by design. Repeatability is what turns business continuity into something you can maintain as the environment changes.
Gremlin also brings credibility here through experience. They’ve worked with dozens of Fortune 1000 companies, including four of the top five U.S. banks, facilitating zone and region-level failover tests. That level of enterprise exposure matters because disaster recovery planning is rarely one-size-fits-all. The hardest problems show up in the gaps between teams, systems, and shared dependencies.
Why Disaster Recovery Testing Matters Now
There’s a reason DRT is launching into a moment where “resilience” is being redefined.
Outage impact is increasing because systems are more connected. A disruption in one place cascades into workflows far beyond the original failure.
AI adds another layer. Organisations are building AI-enabled products and operations on top of infrastructure that still needs to behave predictably. If uptime drops, trust drops with it. And in many industries, trust is the product.
There’s also a simple timing truth. The worst time to discover a weakness is when you’re already in crisis mode. That’s when decisions get rushed, workarounds get messy, and the cost of error multiplies.
Disaster recovery testing is how you move that discovery earlier. Into a controlled environment. Into a repeatable practice. Into a place where remediation is still possible without headlines.
That’s the real promise that Gremlin is making: not perfection, but preparedness that you can prove.
Final Thoughts: Resilience Is Proved, Not Assumed
Disaster recovery plans are easy to believe in when nothing is breaking.
But catastrophic events don’t test what you intended to build. They test what you actually built, including the parts no one has looked at in months. That’s why business continuity can’t stay theoretical. It needs evidence.
Gremlin’s Disaster Recovery Testing (DRT) is built around that shift. It takes disaster recovery testing out of the realm of rare, high-effort exercises and turns it into something enterprises can run safely, at scale, with outcomes they can measure and report.
As digital systems get more complex and expectations around uptime get sharper, resilience starts to look less like a policy and more like a discipline. The organisations that treat it that way won’t just recover faster when incidents hit. They’ll make better decisions long before that moment arrives.
If you want more grounded, product-level coverage like this, EM360Tech keeps a close eye on the tools that shape real enterprise reliability, especially when the pressure isn’t hypothetical.
About Gremlin
Gremlin is a proactive reliability platform that helps engineering teams uncover risks, validate system resilience, and stay ahead of outages by managing reliability at scale. Built on enterprise-ready Chaos Engineering principles, Gremlin makes it simple to run controlled tests, automate reliability checks, and prove disaster recovery readiness across complex cloud environments. Trusted by leading organisations, Gremlin gives teams the visibility and control they need to deliver reliable digital services with confidence.
For more information, visit https://www.gremlin.com/
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