People and failback are both real failure domains.
A team can recover into DR and still fail the next step if knowledge, authority, or return-to-primary logic are unclear.
Knowledge resilience
- At least two trained operators per critical recovery path
- Access paths tested before the incident
- Decision authority defined in advance
- Customer communication owner assigned
Failover
Move to DR
Promote or restore the standby site and route traffic there.
Failback
Move back safely
Re-sync data, fence writes, validate freshness, and plan rollback if the return fails.
Many teams test failover once and never test failback. That leaves the recovery loop incomplete.