In today’s fast-paced and always-on digital economy, a few minutes of downtime can cost millions to the business. With global expansion and rising demands for always-on digital experiences, disaster recovery is no longer an optional safeguard — it’s a core business strategy. Hence, it is imperative to build a bulletproof disaster recovery strategy and that is the core responsibility of the engineering teams. It’s no longer about if something goes wrong, but how quickly and seamlessly you can recover, without compromising user trust or business continuity.
Karan Luniya, who is currently a Senior Software Engineer at DoorDash and a CToday Award Winner for “Most Outstanding AI & Automation Architect – 2025”, believes that building a bulletproof DR strategy starts with a simple mindset: plan for failure before it happens. Karan shared his views and said, “Disasters are inevitable in the kind of work we do, whether it is from data centre outages or network partitions and unexpected traffic surges. The question isn’t if something will fail, but when. The key is designing systems that degrade gracefully, recover rapidly, and never compromise user trust.”
Stakes Are Higher Than Ever
Whatever the industry may be, whether it’s real-time food deliveries, streaming high-demand content or financial transactions, downtime today has cascading effects — from lost revenue to brand damage. “When you’re building for scale, your systems aren’t just about uptime; they’re about resilience. That means preparing for sudden failures across compute, storage, networking, and dependencies — and recovering without breaking the user experience,’’ Karan shares
Karan’s Framework for a Bulletproof DR Strategy
From his experience, Karan outlines three pillars for engineering resilient systems. A comprehensive disaster recovery strategy rests on three key pillars – redundancy by design to eliminate single points of failure, granular traffic control for seamless redirection, and automated recovery with real-time observability. Karan, who is a Senior Member at the IEEE, shares, “Adopting chaos engineering ensures systems are tested under failure scenarios, while cross-functional preparedness aligns engineering, product, ops and leadership teams to respond swiftly and effectively. We want to constantly be working towards safeguarding user trust and ensuring business continuity.”
What lies ahead for DR?
It is a good thing that traditional DR Strategies are advancing. By harnessing edge technologies and multi-cloud ecosystems, along with the use of AI, it will be easy for businesses to foresee disruptions earlier and hence get the teams to orchestrate faster. Organizations must engineer platforms that can predict failures in zero time, recover autonomously and maintain seamless user experiences, even under extreme stress or unexpected disruptions. Karan Luniya’s
Journey highlights the power of future-ready engineering in delivering uninterrupted experiences, regardless of the challenges that arise.
