Business continuity and disaster recovery documentation often satisfies auditors while never being exercised end-to-end. Dependencies between applications go undocumented, failover runbooks reference people who have since left the company, and recovery time assumptions are based on best-case bandwidth rather than what is available during a genuine regional outage.
What realistic testing actually looks like
A meaningful DR test fails over a real workload to the recovery site and runs it under production-like load, not merely confirms that a script executes without error. Testing should include the scenarios organizations prefer to avoid: partial failures, degraded network links, and the unavailability of key personnel, since real incidents rarely happen at a convenient time with a full team available.
Recovery point and recovery time objectives should be set per application based on business impact, not applied uniformly across the portfolio. Critical customer-facing and financial systems justify tighter, more expensive recovery targets than internal reporting tools.
JIG helps organizations build and rehearse DR and BCP programs that hold up under real failure conditions, not only in the annual audit binder.