Backup and Disaster Recovery for UK Businesses

Recovery point objective (RPO) is how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time — the last hour of orders, say. Recovery time objective (RTO) is how long a system can be unavailable before the damage becomes serious. Both are business decisions; we help you set them, then engineer backups and recovery to meet them.

Often enough that a problem would be found before you need the backup. For critical systems that usually means automated restore checks on a regular schedule, a full recovery rehearsal at least once a year, and a test after any significant change. We agree the schedule with you based on how critical each system is.

Usually not on its own. Cloud platforms work on a shared responsibility model: they keep their infrastructure running, but protecting your data from deletion, corruption or a compromised account is your job. Provider snapshots also often sit in the same account an attacker could reach.

Backup copies that cannot be changed or deleted for a set retention period — not even by an administrator. If an attacker gains admin access, they still cannot destroy those copies, which makes immutability one of the most cost-effective defences against ransomware.

Only if the attacker cannot reach them. Backups in the same account, under the same credentials, are often encrypted or deleted along with everything else. Separate accounts, immutable copies and alerts on unusual deletions make recovery possible; a rehearsed runbook makes it quicker. A personal data breach may also need reporting to the ICO within 72 hours — your DPO or data protection lead makes that call.

No. We work UK business hours and do not run an out-of-hours incident desk. We design recovery so your own team, or an out-of-hours provider, can carry it out from a clear runbook — and we rehearse it with them, so the first real recovery is not the first attempt.

It needs a plan too. SaaS providers generally protect against their own failures, not against your mistakes or a compromised account. Where a tool offers exports or an API, we can automate regular copies into storage you control; where a dedicated backup product is the better answer, we will say so.

It is part of it. Disaster recovery gets systems and data back; business continuity covers how the organisation keeps operating in the meantime — manual workarounds, communications, suppliers. We write the technical recovery plans and the parts of the continuity plan that depend on them, and work with whoever owns the wider plan.

It depends on the number of systems and how demanding your recovery targets are — recovering within minutes costs far more than recovering by the next day. We start with a review and a design, then quote the build at a fixed price. Ongoing restore testing and reviews can run as a monthly retainer.

With an honest inventory: what you run, where the data lives, what is backed up today and when a restore was last tested. The first fixes are usually the highest-risk gaps — no offsite copy, no immutable copy, no restore ever tested — and they are rarely the most expensive ones.