Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Stratify IT provides disaster recovery and business continuity services for businesses that cannot afford extended downtime. We handle both the planning work (recovery plans, backup architecture, continuity protocols) and the emergency response when systems fail.
IT Emergency Response and Recovery
According to Forbes, downtime costs have risen to $9,000 per minute in 2024. Our team remotely monitors and manages your IT infrastructure with defined response procedures for when systems fail. We specialize in:
- Restoring Corrupted Email Systems to Full Functionality
- Retrieving Lost Data Across Distributed Servers and Company-Wide File Systems
- Addressing System-Wide Network Failures Quickly and Efficiently
- Repairing Internet Connectivity Issues
- Resolving Server Issues Caused by Security Breaches
- Recovery from Ransomware Attacks
- Cloud Infrastructure Restoration
- Network Security Incident Management
- Restoring Business Applications
- Mobile Device Recovery and Management
- Disaster Recovery for Remote Teams
- Proactive Risk Assessment and Mitigation
Stratify IT has direct experience restoring critical systems across ransomware incidents, infrastructure failures, and data loss events.
Disaster Recovery Services
Stratify IT provides disaster recovery and business continuity services covering:
Disaster Planning and Preparedness
We'll help you develop a disaster recovery plan that outlines the steps necessary for a swift and effective recovery.
Data Backup and Restoration
We ensure your critical data is securely backed up and readily accessible in the event of a disaster. Your data is continuously backed up, ensuring we can recover the entirety of your data, not just fragments.
Zero Trust
We employ a zero trust security model to minimize potential vulnerabilities in your network, ensuring that no device or user is inherently trusted, even inside the perimeter.
Cybersecurity Risks
We integrate layered cybersecurity measures into your disaster recovery plan to safeguard your data from malicious actors, addressing current and emerging cybersecurity risks.
Network and System Recovery
Our team has the expertise to quickly restore your network and systems to functionality, minimizing downtime and data loss. Our team prioritizes restoring critical systems first, with documented recovery sequences that minimize total downtime.
Vulnerability Management
Our vulnerability management practices continuously assess and address security gaps, keeping your data protected from emerging threats.
Our data is stored in highly secured private cloud facilities with advanced security measures, ensuring your data remains safe from both cyber and physical threats.
Business Continuity Planning
Stratify IT helps organizations build and maintain continuity programs that address the following:
Optimize IT Performance
Our managed IT services ensure smooth IT infrastructure operations, with proactive support to prevent downtime and maximize efficiency.
Business Processes
Our IT solutions optimize your business processes, ensuring operational efficiency, reducing downtime, and enhancing productivity.
Access Controls and Data Protection
Strict access controls ensure only authorized personnel can reach sensitive data, reducing exposure from both external attacks and insider threats.
Make Informed Technology Decisions
Strategic IT consulting provides expert guidance, helping you make informed technology decisions aligned with your business goals.
Business Growth
With our managed IT services, your business can scale more efficiently, supporting business growth without the burden of IT complexity.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning
Documented expertise in disaster recovery and business continuity ensures your operations remain resilient during unexpected disruptions.
Develop a Tested Disaster Recovery Plan
Craft a plan to ensure swift recovery from IT emergencies, minimizing downtime and data loss.
Implement Business Continuity Strategies
Establish protocols to keep your business operational during a crisis, allowing your staff to continue working productively with minimal disruption.
Proactive Disaster Recovery Planning
We build recovery plans before incidents occur, with documented runbooks, defined RTOs/RPOs, and regular testing, so the plan works when you need it.
How to Make the Transition:
- Assess Current Vulnerabilities: Identify areas where your current disaster recovery plan may fall short to prioritize improvements.
- Implement Proactive Strategies: Develop mitigation strategies by anticipating potential threats, including regular risk assessments and continuous monitoring.
- Review Regularly: Update your recovery plan as your systems, vendors, and threat environment change.
A tested recovery plan reduces both downtime duration and data loss when an incident occurs.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning
Assessing Risks and Vulnerabilities
A critical first step in disaster recovery planning is a thorough risk assessment. This process involves identifying potential threats to your business, such as IT infrastructure failures, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and human errors. Conducting a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) helps you understand the consequences of these threats on your operations, enabling you to prioritize recovery efforts effectively.
Building Your Disaster Recovery Team
Establishing a dedicated disaster recovery team ensures clear ownership of response procedures. This team should include representatives from each department and be led by a disaster recovery coordinator. Their responsibilities include updating the recovery plan, conducting regular drills, and ensuring all employees are aware of their roles during a disaster.
To effectively manage these tasks, documentation is essential. This should include the identification and contact details of key personnel in the disaster recovery team. Clearly outlining each member's roles and responsibilities ensures accountability and swift action during an emergency.
Key Responsibilities of the Disaster Recovery Team:
- Disaster Recovery Coordinator: Oversees the entire process, ensuring all plans are current and drills are conducted regularly.
- Department Representatives: Ensure department-specific procedures align with the overall recovery plan and communicate any changes to their teams.
- Documentation Specialist: Maintains up-to-date records of all team members' contact information and specific roles.
- Third-party Vendors: We manage vendor relationships within your continuity plan, addressing supply chain risks and contractual recovery obligations.
- Edge Computing: With the rise of edge computing, we offer services that extend data processing to the edge of your network, enhancing speed and reducing latency.
By structuring the team in this manner, organizations can ensure an effective response to disasters, minimizing downtime and maintaining operations.
Testing and Maintaining Efficiency
To ensure your disaster recovery plan remains effective, develop a test strategy and corresponding test plan. Regularly conduct these tests to assess the plan's efficiency. Record the results meticulously, analyze them for any weaknesses, and modify the plan as required. This iterative process keeps your recovery procedures aligned with how your environment actually operates. Understanding that disaster recovery is a critical component of business continuity, organizations must ensure their plans are not only tested but also embedded into daily operations.
Implementing Industry-Specific Solutions
Every industry has unique challenges and requirements for disaster recovery. For example:
- Healthcare: Ensure compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and maintain the availability of patient records.
- Finance: Focus on securing financial data and maintaining transaction continuity.
- Legal: Prioritize the protection of sensitive client information and case files.
Ongoing IT Management and Monitoring
Effective disaster recovery depends on what happens before an incident, not just during one. Stratify IT provides continuous monitoring and infrastructure management that reduces both the frequency and severity of outages:
- Proactive patch management keeps systems current and reduces exploitable vulnerabilities.
- Remote monitoring identifies failures and anomalies before they escalate.
- Zero trust access controls limit lateral movement during a breach, containing the blast radius.
- Hybrid and cloud infrastructure support ensures your recovery environment is accessible regardless of what happens to on-premises systems.
- Flat-fee managed services keep costs predictable, no per-incident billing during a crisis.
Get Started with Disaster Recovery Planning
Stratify IT provides managed backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity services scoped to your systems and recovery requirements.
For expert backup and data recovery tips, explore our leadership blogs for valuable insights and best practices.
Discuss Your Recovery Requirements
Talk to our team about your RTO, RPO, and current backup posture
Common Questions About Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity
Disaster recovery (DR) focuses on restoring IT systems and data after a disruption, getting servers, applications, and networks back online. Business continuity planning (BCP) is broader. It covers how the entire organization keeps functioning during recovery, including personnel, communication, facilities, and vendor relationships. A company can restore its servers in four hours (DR) but still lose days of productivity if the BCP, who does what, who communicates with whom, was never defined.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable time a system can be offline before the business impact becomes unacceptable. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data loss tolerable, measured in time, if the RPO is one hour, backups must occur at least hourly. These two metrics define your disaster recovery requirements and directly determine the cost of the solution. Tighter RTOs and RPOs require more infrastructure investment.
The 3-2-1 rule means keeping three copies of data, on two different media types, with one copy offsite. It remains the baseline standard. In 2025, most implementations extend it to 3-2-1-1-0: the additional "1" means one copy is immutable (cannot be altered or deleted by ransomware), and "0" means zero backup errors verified through regular restore testing. Untested backups are consistently among the top failure points when a real recovery is needed.
Traditional backup solutions copy data on a schedule and require manual recovery steps that can take hours or days. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) replicates systems continuously to a cloud environment and enables near-instant failover, often within minutes. The SLA for a DRaaS solution defines specific RTO and RPO commitments. For businesses where even a few hours of downtime causes significant financial or regulatory consequences, DRaaS is the more appropriate architecture.
A tabletop exercise is a structured walkthrough of a disaster scenario, participants talk through their response to a simulated ransomware attack, data center outage, or natural disaster without actually executing the recovery steps. It surfaces gaps in the plan: who has the authority to trigger failover, who contacts customers, what happens if key staff are unavailable. NIST and most cyber insurance carriers recommend annual tabletop exercises as part of a mature DR program.
Ransomware introduces two DR requirements that traditional backup planning often misses. First, backups connected to the primary network can be encrypted alongside production systems, making immutable or air-gapped copies essential, the same principle applies to cloud-based data in Microsoft 365. Second, restoring from backup without forensic verification risks reinfecting the environment with the same malware. CISA recommends maintaining at least one offline, encrypted backup copy tested within the past 90 days as baseline ransomware preparedness.
Annual testing satisfies most compliance requirements, including HIPAA contingency planning standards. In practice, once a year is insufficient for environments that change frequently, cloud configurations, new applications, staff turnover. The most resilient organizations test critical system recovery quarterly and run a full BCP tabletop exercise annually. Cyber insurance carriers increasingly ask for evidence of testing frequency during renewal, and undocumented or infrequent testing can affect coverage terms.
A managed IT provider handles the operational execution of disaster recovery, monitoring for failure conditions, managing backup infrastructure, executing recovery runbooks, and communicating with stakeholders during an incident. They also maintain and test the DR plan on an ongoing basis, which most organizations cannot sustain internally. Under a defined SLA, the provider is accountable for meeting specific RTO and RPO targets rather than best-effort recovery after the fact.
Yes, across multiple frameworks. HIPAA requires covered entities and business associates to implement a contingency plan addressing data backup, disaster recovery, and emergency operations. CMMC Level 2 requires documented backup and recovery procedures. NYDFS Part 500 requires a business continuity and disaster recovery plan reviewed annually. For defense contractors and healthcare organizations, a documented, tested DR plan is not optional, it is an audit requirement.