A readiness review checks ownership, SLOs, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, capacity, security, backup/restore, deployment safety, dependency quotas, and escalation. The rigor should match the system's criticality.

A game day rehearses realistic incidents such as a failed database promotion, bad deployment, credential compromise, queue backlog, or regional outage. Measure time to detect, decide, mitigate, and recover. Verify communication and customer-impact assessment as well as technical response.

A documented policy is weaker than evidence from a successful restore drill or failover test. Record accepted risks and name an owner for reviewing them.