Stage 7: Demonstrate recovery and the first operating review

Planning allowance: 1–2 weeks; 8–16 hours plus the actual restore exercise. Have the business owner select a critical service and define acceptable restored functionality. Test the dependencies: identity, credentials, network access, application configuration and data integrity.

A recovery platform is one component; Rubrik's cyber-resilience offering is an example of that category, not evidence that your application can be restored. Your exercise must produce the evidence.

At the first service review, examine coverage gaps, failed integrations, investigation quality, escalation delays, unresolved remediation and remaining internal workload. Assign owners and dates rather than merely receiving a dashboard.

Exit criterion: a tested service, a recorded recovery result and a short funded improvement queue. Pitfall: equating a successful backup job with a successful return to business operation.