The Configuration Drift Discovery During a Drill

Quarterly recovery drill. Backup job green for four months. Restore executes cleanly — data intact, VM boots, database service starts. The application fails on the first transaction. Three hours disappear into backup triage before anyone checks the environment. The backup was not the problem. It never was. This is recovery configuration drift — and it belongs to the same class of data protection failure where the protection plane reports success and the recovery plane produces nothing useful. Wh