Backup & Disaster Recovery

Backup is a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the plan and the capability to get the business running again — which needs the data, but also the systems, the sequence, and someone who knows the order to do it in. Plenty of businesses have solid backups and no idea how they'd rebuild a domain controller at seven in the morning. Both matter, and they're not the same purchase.

Recovery Point Objective is how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time — if you back up nightly, your RPO is up to a day. Recovery Time Objective is how long you can afford to be down before the impact becomes serious. They're business decisions, not IT ones, and they drive the entire design. A business that can lose a day's work needs something very different from one that can't lose an hour.

Because we restore from them. Monitoring tells us a job completed; only a recovery test tells us the data is usable. We test recovery periodically and document the outcome, so if you're ever asked to prove your recovery capability there's a record rather than an assumption.

Encrypted, with copies held off-site or in cloud storage so a fire, flood or theft at your premises doesn't take the backup with it. The specific arrangement depends on your data volumes, recovery targets and any obligations you have about where data may reside — we agree it with you and document it.

The value of the backup depends entirely on decisions made long before the incident: whether backup copies are reachable from a compromised network, how far back clean copies go, and whether anyone has practised the recovery. That's why we design for isolation and retention rather than only for daily success, and why we test.

Yes, and this is the most common misconception we correct. Cloud platforms protect their infrastructure — they don't protect you from deletion, from a compromised account, or from a departing employee clearing a folder. The shared responsibility model puts your data on your side of the line.