Disaster Recovery and Regulatory Compliance: Why Your Audit Trail Breaks When Your System Does

When regulated systems experience failures, traditional disaster recovery restores operational functionality but fails to preserve the complete audit trails that regulators demand during investigations. Snapshot-based recovery creates significant compliance gaps because regulators need evidence of every decision made and assurance that nothing was corrupted or lost during the failure window. Event sourcing fundamentally changes this dynamic by storing every state change as a permanent, ordered, immutable event, making past states queryable facts rather than reconstructed approximations.