Nothing stress-tests a disaster recovery plan like a real outage. After being hit by failures across multiple Azure services, we learned that a plan you haven't tested is really just a hypothesis.

Most teams have a plan for when things go wrong. Few have tested it under real pressure. Even fewer actually trust it when everything is on fire.

In this session, we’ll ground you in the fundamentals — RTO, RPO, failover strategies, and what business continuity really means when alerts are flooding in and time is running out. From there, we’ll walk through some of the concepts and services from Azure toolbox — paired regions, availability zones, Traffic Manager, Key Vault, Storage — not as a checklist, but through the lens of the decisions we had to make when things broke.

But the real story is what we got wrong. The assumptions that seemed reasonable until they weren't. The gaps we only discovered under pressure. The workbooks that saved us. We'll also cover immutable infrastructure as a key technique for making recovery predictable and repeatable. And if you're considering a DR region that isn't paired with your primary — we've been there too, and there are extra challenges you'll want to know about before you commit.

You'll leave with a clearer mental model of BCDR in Azure, a concrete checklist of things to validate before you need them, and at least one thing we'd do differently from day one.