Disaster Recovery Rehearsal and Game Days on AWS by Dedicatted

Heads of SRE, Infrastructure and Technology Risk at software, media, financial services and other operators that already run a multi-AZ or multi-Region design on AWS and need proof that it recovers. The CISO, internal audit and the board read what it produces. We rehearse the design you have, whoever built it, and we do not sell you a new one.

Most organisations can show a disaster recovery diagram; few can show the last time a failover was timed. RTO and RPO sit in a policy, the runbooks were written by people who have moved on, and the first real failover happens during an incident. Auditors, boards and enterprise customers ask for dated records of tested recovery, and the SRE team has no repeatable, low-blast-radius way to produce them.

We exercise your current design, measure it, and change it only where a rehearsal shows it fails.

1. Rehearsal baseline. Inventory of the recovery design, runbooks and dependencies in scope; AWS Resilience Hub registration with a resilience policy and a first assessment; agreed blast-radius, stop-condition and rollback rules; a rehearsal calendar for the year.

2. Scheduled rehearsals and game days. Quarterly, on a published date, with your operators at the keyboard and Dedicatted directing: AWS Fault Injection Service scenarios (Availability Zone power interruption, cross-Region connectivity loss, traffic slowdowns) and the tests Resilience Hub recommends; a timed failover and failback through Amazon Application Recovery Controller routing controls, zonal shift or Region switch, Amazon Route 53 and Amazon Aurora Global Database switchover; AWS Backup restore testing and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery drills timed against the stated RPO and RTO; runbooks run through AWS Systems Manager Automation with every deviation recorded; a Resilience Hub re-assessment the same week.

3. Rehearsal record. For every rehearsal: timeline, measured RTO and RPO per application against policy, FIS experiment logs, restore job reports, Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics and alarm evidence, Resilience Hub score before and after, findings and a remediation backlog ranked by what failed. Written for an auditor or board member. It records what happened on the day; mapping it to a specific regulatory framework is outside this service.

4. Remediation (optional). A fixed-scope sprint to fix what a rehearsal found, re-tested at the next one. Architecture changes happen only here.

AWS Fault Injection Service, AWS Resilience Hub, Amazon Application Recovery Controller (routing controls, zonal shift and zonal autoshift practice runs, Region switch), Amazon Route 53 health checks, AWS Backup restore testing, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, AWS Systems Manager Automation, Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics and alarms, Amazon Aurora Global Database, Amazon EKS and Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication.

• A measured RTO and RPO per application per rehearsal against the policy target, instead of a stated one.
• Runbooks executed as written on the day, corrected where they failed and re-run at the next rehearsal.
• A Resilience Hub score trend and a remediation backlog ranked by evidence, so architecture spend goes where a rehearsal proved it is needed.
• A dated record of every rehearsal that your auditors, board and enterprise customers can review.
• Operators who have run a failover before the first real incident.

Dedicatted holds the AWS Cloud Operations Services Competency and the AWS DevOps Consulting Competency. Dedicatted holds the AWS Resilience Competency and is a member of the AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Program. We run managed operations on AWS for financial services and SaaS platforms across Canada, the United States and Europe, and rehearsals slot into that same operating cadence for customers who already use it.

Dedicatted is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner headquartered in Toronto and Montreal, Canada, the first Canadian partner to hold both AWS AI Competencies (Generative AI and Agentic AI), and the first and only Canadian AWS Partner to hold the AWS Digital Sovereignty Services Competency. We deliver across Canada, the United States and Europe, in English and French, and support Canadian data residency in the AWS Canada (Central) and Canada West (Calgary) Regions.

Rehearsals provision resources in your AWS account that AWS bills to you: AWS Fault Injection Service experiments, AWS Backup restore testing jobs and restored resources, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery drill instances, Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics canaries, AWS Resilience Hub assessments and, where agreed, temporary capacity in the recovery Region. Drill and restore resources are removed after each rehearsal. We work through IAM roles you create, scoped to each exercise and the services above; no standing administrative access is retained.