Managed IT · Backup & DR

Managed backup and disaster recovery you can test and trust

Backups fail quietly. We operationalize backup success, retention, immutability options, and restore drills so recovery is a practiced capability—not a hope. Technical targets map to business RTO and RPO with owners named in the runbook, not only in a slide deck.

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Reality check

Green backup jobs vs. provable recovery

Common drift

When “we have backups” means hope

Jobs show success while data is incomplete. Nobody has restored SQL in three years. Retention is “forever” until storage bills explode. Ransomware hits and immutability was never turned on.

  • Silent agent failures after OS upgrades
  • VMs excluded “temporarily” in 2021
  • No documented RTO/RPO per application
  • Restore tests canceled every quarter

Managed BCDR

When recovery is operated

Policies match criticality. Tests produce tickets and reports. Air-gap and immutable tiers exist where risk demands them. Incidents have a communication tree.

  • Backup coverage mapped to app inventory
  • Quarterly—or better—restore evidence
  • Escalation when immutability gaps appear
  • Runbooks executives can follow under stress

Capabilities

What we operate end to end

Expand each area for policy, platform care, validation, and incident coordination—we meet your stack where it is.

What to protect, how often, and how long—by workload criticality—with cost and compliance in the same conversation.

  • Alignment to legal hold and records requirements
  • Tiered retention: hot, warm, cold, and offline where needed

Job monitoring, dedupe health, storage capacity, and integration with infrastructure operations for agents and hosts.

  • Ticketed triage on repeated failures
  • Capacity forecasting before backup windows slip

Scheduled test restores and evidence your auditors and insurers increasingly ask for—file, application, and bare-metal paths as scoped.

  • Sample-based and full DR exercises
  • Documentation of what was restored, when, and by whom

Step-by-step recovery for tier-1 systems, dependency order, and communication trees so midnight bridges are not improvisation.

  • Failover and failback checklists
  • Vendor and carrier contact trees

Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, SaaS APIs, and hybrid data paths—as explicitly scoped, with gaps versus native tools written down.

  • Coordination with collaboration administration for tenant boundaries
  • Third-party backup tools when required for mail, Teams, or Drive

Coordination during ransomware or datacenter events with security, legal, and leadership—preserve, isolate, restore, and communicate in the right order.

  • Immutable copy verification under stress
  • Post-incident backup architecture hardening

Ransomware & audit

Design assumptions attackers test for you

We help you avoid “we thought it was immutable” Monday morning quarterbacks.

Immutability

Object-lock patterns and retention locks appropriate to your platform and regulatory posture.

Segregation

Backup admin accounts separated from domain admin where policies allow.

Offline & air-gap

Tape, vault, or isolated cloud accounts when risk warrants true separation.

Evidence

Test results and job logs mapped to control language for SOC 2 and ISO programs.

Legal hold

Technical execution of holds you authorize; strategy stays with counsel.

Tabletop tie-in

DR scripts exercised against realistic ransomware scenarios, not only datacenter fire drills.

Use cases

Where managed BCDR pays off

Ransomware readiness programs

Boards and insurers ask for proof—not slideware. We operationalize immutable tiers, test restores, and IR handoffs alongside your SOC.

  • Quarterly evidence packages
  • Clear “worst day” decision trees

Regulated industries

Healthcare, finance, and public sector need retention and testing discipline that survives scrutiny.

  • Audit-friendly documentation

Hybrid & multi-cloud

On-prem, IaaS, and SaaS in one recovery narrative—without three unrelated backup admins.

  • Single governance model across estates

Outcomes

What improves when backups are a service

Pair BCDR with server and infrastructure management for end-to-end health from host through restore.

  • Measurable improvement in successful backup completion rates
  • Documented RTO/RPO targets per application tier
  • Regular proof of restore—not only green dashboards
  • Clear escalation when immutability or air-gap gaps appear
  • Cost-aware retention tiered to value and compliance

Our Approach

From assessment to operated recovery

Step 1

Discover

Application inventory, current backup tools, gaps, regulatory drivers, and RTO/RPO workshops with business owners.

Step 2

Design

Policy tiers, architecture for immutability and SaaS, retention economics, and RACI with security and legal.

Step 3

Implement

Job baselines, monitoring hooks, ticketing integration, and initial restore tests.

Step 4

Operate

Daily health, failure triage, capacity management, and cadenced test restores.

Step 5

Improve

Annual architecture review, ransomware scenario updates, and roadmap for platform changes.

Why intSignal

Benefits of operated backup and DR

Sleep better

Alerts that mean something and humans who respond—without waking the whole team for every dedupe warning.

Audit-ready evidence

Logs, test results, and ticket trails your GRC team can actually submit.

Ransomware-aware design

Immutable copies and offline patterns where appropriate, with testing that assumes bad actors.

Cost-aware retention

Tiered storage aligned to value and compliance—not infinite retention by default.

FAQ

Common questions

We are agnostic—we operate the stack you own or help you select one during design, without tying outcomes to a single vendor pitch.

At minimum quarterly for critical systems; higher frequency for regulated or high-change environments, with evidence retained.

Often scoped separately with explicit retention and legal hold considerations—we document gaps native tools do not cover.

We coordinate agents, storage, maintenance windows, and changes with server and infrastructure scope so backups stay healthy through patching and migrations.

Yes when scoped—architecture depends on risk, compliance, and RTO/RPO; we document deletion controls and test ransomware scenarios.

Scope backup and disaster recovery

Share platforms, approximate data volumes, SaaS footprint, and regulatory drivers—we will propose policy tiers, test cadence, and operations model.

What managed backup and disaster recovery services include

Backup and disaster recovery services combine two disciplines that are often bought separately and rarely tested together. Managed backup, or BaaS, protects data at the file, database, virtual machine, and SaaS-application level, capturing point-in-time copies on a schedule matched to how quickly each workload changes. Disaster recovery, or DRaaS, goes further — it stands your systems up in a secondary cloud or data-center location so operations continue when primary infrastructure is lost. We design both around two numbers: recovery point objective (RPO), how much data you can afford to lose, and recovery time objective (RTO), how quickly systems must be back online. Every backup schedule, replication interval, and failover design flows from those targets rather than a generic default.

A complete service pairs immutable backups with offsite and cloud replication, so a copy always exists outside the reach of the systems it protects. Retention is tiered — short-interval snapshots for fast rollback, longer-held copies for compliance and historical recovery — and restores are verified on a schedule rather than assumed to work.

Why immutable backups and tested recovery matter for ransomware

Modern ransomware does not stop at encrypting production data. Attackers deliberately hunt for and delete backups first, because destroying the recovery path is what forces the ransom payment. Immutability is the countermeasure. An immutable backup cannot be altered or erased for the duration of its retention lock — not by an administrator, a compromised account, or the malware itself. Combined with offsite copies that are logically separated from your network, immutability means a clean, known-good restore point survives even a full domain compromise. That is the difference between negotiating with an attacker and recovering on your own terms.

Ransomware recovery also depends on proof that restores actually work. We run recovery testing on a defined cadence, restoring workloads into an isolated environment and validating that data is intact, applications start, and RTO targets are met. Results are documented, so recovery is a rehearsed procedure rather than a hope. Backups that have never been restored are a liability, not a safeguard.

Business continuity planning, runbooks, and incident response

Technology alone does not keep a business running through a disruption — the plan around it does. Business continuity planning identifies which processes are critical, how long each can be down, and what dependencies sit behind them. From that analysis we build documented runbooks: step-by-step recovery procedures that specify who does what, in what order, with which systems, and how success is confirmed. When an outage or attack hits, the team executes a known sequence instead of improvising under pressure, which is where most recovery efforts fail.

Backup and disaster recovery services work best as part of a wider security posture, not in isolation. Recovery ties directly into incident response — the same event that triggers containment and forensic investigation also triggers restore procedures. We align backup, DR, and incident response so decisions about isolation, evidence preservation, and recovery are coordinated rather than in conflict, turning a security incident into a controlled event rather than an existential one.

Who managed backup and disaster recovery is for, and the outcomes

These services fit any organization where downtime or data loss carries real cost — regulated firms with retention and audit obligations, operations that cannot pause without losing revenue, and teams without the in-house depth to manage backup infrastructure and rehearse recovery. The value is not the backup itself but the guaranteed ability to recover, verified and reported on continuously.

The outcomes are concrete: predictable RPO and RTO you can put in front of leadership and auditors, immutable copies that survive ransomware, tested restores that remove guesswork, and a documented continuity plan that satisfies cyber-insurance and compliance requirements. Under a managed model, patching, capacity, monitoring, and testing are handled for you, and recovery becomes a measured operational routine instead of a crisis.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between BaaS and DRaaS?

Backup as a service (BaaS) protects your data by keeping recoverable copies you can restore from, typically at the file, database, or virtual-machine level. Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) protects your operations by replicating whole systems to a secondary environment and failing them over, so applications keep running when primary infrastructure is unavailable. Most organizations need both — backup for granular data recovery, DRaaS for fast continuity of critical systems.

What are RPO and RTO, and how do I set them?

Recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data, measured in time, you can afford to lose, and it drives how often backups and replication run. Recovery time objective (RTO) is how quickly a system must be restored after an outage. We set both per workload based on business impact: a transactional database may need an RPO of minutes and a short RTO, while an archive can tolerate far more.

How do immutable backups protect against ransomware?

An immutable backup cannot be modified or deleted until its retention lock expires, even by an administrator or a compromised account. Because ransomware commonly targets backups before encrypting production data, immutability preserves a clean restore point the attacker cannot reach. Paired with offsite copies that are separated from your network, it lets you recover without paying a ransom.

How often should disaster recovery be tested?

We recommend testing critical workloads at least quarterly, running an annual full failover exercise, and adding tests after any major infrastructure change. Testing restores data into an isolated environment to confirm integrity, application startup, and that RTO targets are met. Documented results turn recovery from an assumption into a proven procedure, because untested backups frequently fail when they are needed most.

Do you back up Microsoft 365 and other SaaS applications?

Yes. SaaS providers keep their platform running, but under the shared-responsibility model your data remains your responsibility. We back up Microsoft 365 and other supported SaaS applications to independent immutable storage, so you can recover from accidental deletion, retention gaps, or account compromise — scenarios that native recycle bins and short retention windows do not cover.

How does backup and disaster recovery fit with incident response?

They are two halves of the same response. When a security incident occurs, incident response handles containment, investigation, and evidence preservation, while disaster recovery restores affected systems from clean backups. We coordinate the two so restoration does not destroy forensic evidence and containment does not block recovery, keeping both objectives aligned throughout the event.

Will managed backup and disaster recovery help meet compliance and cyber-insurance requirements?

It directly supports them. Regulations and insurers increasingly require immutable backups, defined RPO and RTO, tested recovery, and a documented continuity plan. Our service produces the retention controls, restore evidence, and reporting that auditors and underwriters ask for, which can also strengthen the terms of your coverage.