Colette Alexander, Resilience in Software Foundation
While many engineers and leaders participate in and sponsor disaster recovery (DR) activities at their companies, few ever need to wrestle with whether their DR systems will work in reality. This is because of the resilience and robustness of the systems they work within (and maybe a bit of luck). But what if we needed to use our DR plans in reality one day? What would happen then? Using real-life stories from the movies, the US defense department, and nuclear power we can illuminate what some of the weaknesses of our own DR plans are, and then come up with tactical and philosophical approaches to making DR exercises better for everyone.
Colette has been working as an engineering leader in the software industry for 10+ years. Her obsession with learning from incidents and Resilience Engineering began while managing teams at Spotify. It eventually led her to pursue her Masters in Science at Lund University in Human Factors and Systems Safety. She has led organizations in SRE and observability at HashiCorp and Cognite. She also maintains an active composition and recording career as a rock cellist, and lives with her rescue dog, 2 kids and husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
author = {Colette Alexander},
title = {Three Lies We Tell Ourselves about Disaster Recovery and What to Do about Them},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
