Dear person with four business cards,
We know.
We know you did not ask for any of this. We know the titles keep showing up on your email signature without a conversation. We know your team of 7-ish people and company of 1,000+. We know you were on the cloud team, and then they added security, and then they added IT, and then last quarter somebody made you "head of business continuity" or something.
We know you ran a disaster recovery drill last quarter. We know during that drill Heather in accounting nuked her mailbox and you stopped to go fix it, because that is the job. We know the drill sort of finished. We know you wrote a report that said "Passed." We know 14 things were broken and you fixed 11 and the other 3 either slipped by or are in a ticket from February that nobody has touched.
We know what happened last month when US-East had a weird day. We know you tried to fail over. We know it didn't work. We know it took you until 2am to figure out that one config change in the Secrets Manager three months earlier had quietly killed your recovery path.
We know the backup was fine. We know the data was fine. We know the last drill passed. We know when you tried to run a transaction it didn't work.
We know when you walked home at 2am and the next morning your CEO asked if the company could recover and you said yes and you moved the meeting along.
We know you were not lying on purpose. We know everybody lies about this, because the alternative is nobody gets promoted and nobody closes the audit and nobody goes home on time. One CISO told us on a call, "compliance requires recovery testing but everybody lies about it." He was not being cynical. He was just being honest.
Here's what we also know.
We know your DR plan and runbook is a PDF from 2019. We know the person who wrote it left in Q2 2022. We know your backup vendor emails you saying everything is green. We know you're looking at so many dashboards you should be able to see through time. We know to you, they're not panes of glass, they're glasses of pain. We know your dashboards say everything is green. We know your auditor says everything is green. We know recovery isn't green.
We know you are blind 364 days a year when it comes to recovery and the one day a year you are not supposed to be blind, a consultant charges you $400,000 to run an imaginary tabletop exercise with bagels and hands you a slide deck that does not survive contact with your next terraform deploy.
We know the thing that keeps you up is not whether your backups ran. We know the thing that keeps you up is whether any of it would actually come back. We know there might be a config issue, or a missing dependency, or a million other things.
We know internal teams are changing things at machine speed with AI. We know hackers are attacking you at machine speed with AI. We know recovery testing and remediation is done manually, at human speed, once or twice a year, if that.
We know because you told us. Hundreds of you have now told us some version of the same sentence.
"The backups are fine. It's everything else that worries me. Every time we run a recovery test it fails. Every time. It's always a new issue."
Here is what we built for you.
We scan your infrastructure with a read-only role. We build a dependency map and context graph. We rebuild your environment in a sandbox inside your own VPC, from scratch, using your actual backups. We run a real business transaction against it.
Binary answer. Yes or no.
If no, we tell you what failed and give you the fix. We put it in your ticketing system or ping it in your Slack/Teams.
We just do the recovery testing and remediation work. Continuously. At machine speed.
No new dashboard. You already have 14. We just do the work.
We are not going to tell you this is going to make you the hero of your company.
We are going to tell you something more useful than that.
We are going to make it so the next time your boss's boss asks if the company can recovery, you say yes and you are not lying. We are going to make it so the auditor signs the report because the evidence is real, not because everybody agreed to not look too hard. We are going to make it so Heather from accounting can still nuke her mailbox in the middle of the drill and the drill keeps running anyway, because the drill is continuous now and it does not need you to block weeks for setup, planning, testing, and remediation.
We are going to make it so your seven people don't have to be seventy people. Just fifty now. We have recovery testing, remediation, and evidence gathering taken care of.
Let's have a conversation.
We will find something about your infrastructure nobody on your team knows about. A silent recovery failure that will lead to downtime.
We will fix it immediately. Then we will find a new one tomorrow. Your infrastructure changes hundreds of times a day.
And if we cannot find anything, we will tell you the truth: you are doing better than every company we have spoken to.
We have never had to say that yet.
With love,
Patrick and Marston
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