Backup and disaster recovery for Tampa businesses
A backup you've never restored from is a hope, not a plan. Disaster recovery in Tampa means knowing how long you'd be down after a flood, a ransomware hit or a dead server, and having a tested answer for each.
Signs your backups aren't ready
- The backup is an external drive plugged into the server it's backing up
- Nobody has tried a restore in the last year
- Microsoft 365 or Google data isn't backed up at all because 'it's in the cloud'
- You don't know how many days of work you'd lose
- The server sits on the floor of a ground-floor office near the bay
- The plan for a hurricane is 'close and hope'
What a real plan includes
Image-based server backup
Whole-server snapshots to a local appliance and to the cloud, so a dead server can be spun up as a virtual machine in minutes.
Microsoft 365 backup
Mail, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams backed up independently of Microsoft, so a deleted mailbox or a ransomware-encrypted library can come back.
Workstation backup
For the people whose desktop is where the real files live, whatever the policy says.
Immutable copies
Backups that ransomware can't encrypt or delete even with an administrator's password.
Tested restores
Scheduled restore tests with a report, because a backup job that says 'success' has lied before.
A written recovery plan
Who calls whom, where staff log in from, how phones forward, and what order systems come back in.
How we build the plan
- Find what matters. Which systems and files the business can't run without, and how many hours of lost work is tolerable.
- Map the risks. Flood zone, power reliability, single points of failure, and who holds the only copy of what.
- Put the backups in. Local, cloud and immutable layers sized to the data, with Microsoft 365 covered separately.
- Test it. Restore a file, a mailbox and a whole server, and time each one. Repeat on a schedule.
- Write it down. A short plan the office manager can follow at 6 am with the power out.
What affects the price
- Amount of data and how fast it changes.
- How quickly you need to be running again. Minutes costs more than a day.
- Number of servers and Microsoft 365 users.
- Retention period, especially for regulated records.
You get a written quote for your job or your monthly plan before anything is billed.
Disaster recovery in Tampa Bay
Hurricane season runs June through November, and the real risk for most Tampa offices isn't wind, it's surge flooding in the low areas and a week or more without power. A server in a ground-floor suite in South Tampa, Westshore or St. Petersburg's waterfront neighborhoods needs a copy somewhere far away, and the staff need a way to work without the building.
After the 2024 storms, businesses that recovered fastest had three things: files already in the cloud, phones that forwarded to cell phones automatically, and a one-page plan everyone had read. None of that is expensive compared to a week of closed doors. See business phones for the forwarding piece.
Common questions
Isn't the cloud already backed up?
Microsoft and Google keep your data available; they don't protect you from your own deletions, a departed employee emptying a folder, or ransomware syncing encrypted files. Retention windows are short. A separate backup fixes that.
How often should backups run?
Servers and Microsoft 365 several times a day, workstations at least daily. The right answer comes from asking how many hours of work you could stand to redo.
How long would we be down?
With image-based backup to the cloud, a failed server can be running virtually within an hour or two. Without it, you're waiting on new hardware and a rebuild, which is days.
Do you help with the hurricane plan itself?
Yes. Shutdown checklist, what to unplug and move, how staff log in from home, how phones forward, and how systems come back after. It's part of every disaster recovery engagement.
Related services
- Outage and ransomware responseServer down, nobody can log in, ransom note on the screen. Answered 24/7.
- Microsoft 365 and cloudMigration, licensing, Teams and SharePoint setup, and a tenant locked down right.
- Managed IT and helpdeskFlat-fee IT department for 5 to 100 people: helpdesk, monitoring, patching, vendors.
Areas we serve
Backup and disaster recovery across Tampa and these nearby communities: