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Tested, Not Just Written
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Securance has more than two decades of experience helping organizations combat evolved cyber threats, build effective risk management programs, align with compliance standards, and increase operational efficiency.
Our comprehensive approach integrates proven methodologies, dependable expertise, and each customer’s unique requirements to maximize the benefits and long term value of each assessment.
INTRODUCTION
When auditors go looking for disaster recovery and incident response plans, they usually find them. What they find less often is evidence that anyone has tested them. Michigan’s state agencies had about 370 disaster recovery plans on file. When the state auditor reviewed them, 229 had no recorded test date and 234 had no renewal date.
For a long time that gap was tolerable. Then ransomware operators started going after the means of recovery first: the backups, the virtualization layer, and the credentials that control both. A plan can pass every review and still fail on the night someone opens it, because the tools it names are already gone.
This white paper argues that a recovery or response plan is only as good as its last test. It draws on after-action reports from Nevada and Saint Paul, a joint FBI and CISA advisory, IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach study, and a ransomware response Securance led for a city government. Using that material, it lays out the four assumptions every plan makes until it’s tested, and for each one, the exercise that exposes it before an attacker does.
The question a board will ask is when the plan was last run, by whom, and what changed afterward. Whether a plan exists is the part auditors already check.