Topic starter
02/09/2026 1:29 pm
TL;DR: Most organisations can name the owners of backup, identity, network, and cloud systems, but recovery still fails when those teams cannot bring dependencies back in the right order, according to ControlMonkey. The real risk is not backup absence but coordinated recovery across configuration, identity, and infrastructure layers, where individual success can still leave the business unable to return.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by ControlMonkey: “Who Owns Disaster Recovery When Everyone Owns a Piece?”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when disaster recovery is owned only at the system level?
A: System-level ownership breaks down when each team restores its own component without a shared recovery sequence.
Q: Why does configuration drift create more risk than a single bad setting?
A: A single bad setting is visible and usually removable.
Q: How do organisations know whether their disaster recovery plan is actually working?
A: They test whether critical services can be restored within the stated RTO and RPO, whether the right people can access the right systems, and whether runbooks can be executed in order.
Practitioner guidance
- Map the full recovery dependency chain Document which identity, DNS, cloud, SaaS, observability and data services must recover before each critical business service can return.
- Test cross-team recovery sequences Run recovery exercises that force cloud, identity, network and application owners to restore together and in order, not in isolation.
- Version and protect configuration states Treat identity policies, network rules, observability settings and cloud configuration as recoverable assets with known-good versions and recovery points.
Bottom line: The article shows that disaster recovery fails when organisations confuse component ownership with coordinated service recovery.
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This topic was modified 2 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group
02/09/2026 1:30 pm
Disaster recovery is an orchestration problem, not a backup problem. Organisations often measure recovery readiness by whether each system has an owner and a restore process, but that does not answer whether the business can come back as a whole. The failure mode is fragmented accountability across cloud, identity, network and application teams. Practitioners should treat coordinated recovery ownership as a governance layer above individual technical owners.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should be accountable for coordinated recovery across cloud and identity teams?
A: Domain teams should remain accountable for their own cloud, identity, network and application recovery tasks, but a resilience lead or equivalent function must own the cross-domain outcome. That role validates dependency order, tests handoffs and confirms that the business-defined recovery objective is achievable.
👉 Read our full editorial: The DR ownership gap is the hidden failure in cyber resilience
This post was modified 2 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group