In my day we used to develop "Disaster Recovery" programs. They were massive, and we tested on a regular basis including renting massive systems from IBM and flying the team to the IBM data center to run a full restore of everything. End business users had to login afterwards and sign off.

I understand we "live in a different world" is the favorite motto these days. But do we really? If anything data is bigger, more complex, not in one place, you can't just ship a truck load of tapes and three people somewhere to test.

IMHO the more we try to reinvent technology the more we realize some of the things we all felt were weighing us down were actually smart ideas brought on not by fear but by real life experience.

And the pendulum will swing once more here and back again at some point in the future.