Cyber Resilience Testing: Why It Still Isn't Happening
Dell, Thursday, August 20th, 2026
Dell and Gartner argue recovery testing is skipped out of organizational fear, not budget, and needs a defined target to matter.
Dell examines why cyber recovery testing keeps being skipped and argues the barrier is not budget or tooling.
It quotes Gartner describing most resilience testing as the kind that cannot fail: tabletop walkthroughs, maturity assessments and recovery times that live on a slide and were never exercised.
Dell's position is that the real obstacle is organizational fear of what a genuine test would reveal. The post argues a test only becomes meaningful once it has a specific target, which means first defining the minimum viable business. It opens with the Pompeii eruption as an analogy for warning signs an organization has learned to live with rather than investigate.