Cloud Backup & Disaster Recovery for UK Businesses

No. Microsoft operates a shared-responsibility model — they keep the service running and replicated, but you're responsible for protecting your data. Native retention is short, recycle bins purge automatically (typically 30–93 days), and there's no protection against ransomware, malicious insiders or accidental deletion you discover months later. An independent third-party Microsoft 365 backup covering Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams is essential, and is required by most UK cyber insurance policies.

Backup is a copy of your data you can restore from — usually file-by-file or mailbox-by-mailbox, taking minutes to hours. Disaster recovery (DR) is about getting whole systems and your business running again after an outage. DRaaS replicates entire servers to a hot standby in the cloud so we can failover in under 15 minutes if your office floods, your hardware dies, or ransomware encrypts your environment. Most clients combine both — backup for everything, DRaaS for the systems where downtime is most expensive.

With our standard immutable cloud backup, granular file and mailbox restores complete in minutes, full server rebuilds typically in 2–6 hours. With Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, the critical systems you've protected with DRaaS failover to a hot standby in under 15 minutes (RTO 15 min, RPO 15 min). Because the backup target is immutable and air-gapped, ransomware that hits production cannot reach or encrypt your recovery copies.

All backups are held in UK-based, ISO 27001-certified data centres with AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS in transit. Data never leaves the UK, which keeps you compliant with UK GDPR and meets data residency requirements for legal, healthcare, financial services and education clients.

Standard cloud backup typically delivers an RPO of 4–24 hours (configurable per workload) and an RTO of a few hours for full server restores. DRaaS clients get an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 15 minutes for protected workloads. We agree the targets in writing as part of your service agreement and prove them with quarterly test restores.

Yes — and we go further. Every protected workload has at least three copies of data, on two different media, with one immutable off-site copy in a UK data centre. For DRaaS clients we add a fourth, replicated copy ready for instant failover. This is the 3-2-1-1-0 model (1 immutable copy, 0 errors verified by test restore) recommended by cyber insurers.

Microsoft 365 backup typically starts from around £3 per user per month. Server and VM backup is priced per protected workload and storage volume — most SMB environments fall between £150 and £600 per month all-in. DRaaS adds a per-VM replication fee. We provide fixed monthly pricing with no egress or restore charges, so a real disaster doesn't come with a surprise invoice.

Yes — significantly. UK cyber insurers increasingly require immutable backups, MFA-protected backup consoles, documented RTO/RPO, and evidence of test restores before they'll quote, renew or pay out a claim. We provide a controls evidence pack that maps directly to insurer questionnaires.

Yes. We onboard from Datto, Veeam, Acronis, Barracuda, Redstor, N-able Cove and in-house solutions regularly. We run a parallel period so the new backup is fully seeded and verified before retiring the old system — there is no exposure window.

We test. Quarterly automated restore tests run against random files, mailboxes and VMs, and we run a full DR drill annually for DRaaS clients (booting replicated servers in an isolated cloud network and validating logins, line-of-business apps and data integrity). You get a written report after every test.