Backups you can restore from, not just backups you have

Why this matters

Data loss isn't a hypothetical. Ransomware, someone deleting the wrong folder, a dead drive, a power event on a Friday afternoon. It happens to businesses that were sure they were covered.

Whether it ends up a minor inconvenience or a serious problem comes down to two things: does the backup work, and how quickly can you get it back? Cloddy takes responsibility for both.

Backup and disaster recovery aren't the same thing

The two terms get used interchangeably, but they do different jobs.

Backup is the copy of your data: files, email, systems. A good backup is recent, stored away from your main systems and protected from tampering.

Disaster recovery is the process of getting the business working again after a failure. It covers the systems, applications and step-by-step plan needed to get people back at their desks, not only the data.

Plenty of businesses have the first without the second, and find out the hard way.

Two questions worth answering now

How much data can you afford to lose? If your backup runs overnight and your server dies at 4pm, you've lost a day's work. We help you decide how often backups should run based on what the business can live with.

How long can you operate without your systems? An hour, a day, a week? The answer decides what kind of recovery setup you need. We design around your answer rather than a one-size-fits-all package.

What we back up

• Microsoft 365: email, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. Microsoft's own retention settings are not a backup, so you need something separate.
• Shared drives and file servers: everything your team stores and works on.
• Servers: physical and virtual.
• Databases: the ones your business-critical applications sit on.
• Key workstations: important files from staff computers where it makes sense.
• Cloud application data: exports from CRM and other platforms where the vendor supports it.

How backups are stored

Backups are encrypted, kept in a separate location from your production systems and retained for as long as your business needs. We use established backup platforms, including Microsoft's own cloud backup tools and Veeam, rather than anything home-grown.

Testing, the step most providers skip

We schedule regular restore tests: pulling data back from backup and confirming it's complete and usable. The results are documented and reported to you. It's the only way to know the backup works before the day you need it.

Keeping the business running during an outage

Recovery is about more than files. We help businesses plan for the period between "it's broken" and "it's fixed":

• working out which systems are critical and in what order they need to come back
• documenting how the team keeps working while systems are down
• setting up communication plans so staff, clients and suppliers know what's happening
• writing a playbook so nobody is improvising under pressure

Protection against ransomware

Ransomware routinely targets backup systems first, encrypting or wiping them before hitting production so there's nothing to fall back on. We protect against that with backup copies attackers can't delete or overwrite, kept separate from your main environment.

Contact Cloddy to talk about backup and recovery, or to find out whether your current backup would hold up.