Backup & Disaster Recovery

Eastern Iowa does not need a hypothetical for this conversation. The August 2020 derecho held 140 mph winds over Cedar Rapids for roughly 45 minutes, knocked out power to essentially every customer in the city, and left 25,000 Linn County customers still dark ten days later. Some waited two weeks. Before that, the floods of 2008 and 2016.

Most businesses we meet do have a backup. Far fewer have ever restored from it, and almost none can tell you how long a restore would take. A backup you have never tested is a hypothesis, not a plan.

What we set up

• Local and offsite copies with immutable retention, so ransomware cannot encrypt your backups along with everything else

• A recovery time and recovery point target for every system, agreed with you in writing

• Quarterly restore tests with documented results and dates

• A ransomware runbook written on the assumption that the office is unreachable

• Planning for the boring disasters too: a dead server, a deleted folder, an employee who left with files

What it is worth

The question is not whether you will need this. It is whether the answer to how long until we are back is a number or a shrug. We make it a number, and then we prove it every quarter.