How a Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategy Provides Peace of Mind
Knowing you can recover from a cyberattack or system failure means being able to grow your business with confidence. Because if you’re constantly worried about your resilience, data loss, and the inability to recover when the worst happens, your growth is going to suffer.
But when you trade away worry for security, everything else becomes a heck of a lot easier. That’s how you get peace of mind.
In this blog, we’re covering why your business needs a backup and disaster recovery strategy, how backups can fail, why testing matters, and how managed service providers can help businesses build a reliable recovery strategy.
Key Takeaways
- A backup alone isn’t enough. Your business needs to implement a layered and complete recovery strategy.
- Backups need to be monitored and tested regularly to make sure they work as expected.
- RPO and RTO help businesses determine how much data they can afford to lose and how long they can afford to be offline.
- An MSP can help businesses build, monitor, and test backup and disaster recovery strategies.
Your Business Needs a Recovery Strategy
Relying on a single backup solution or cloud backup simply isn’t enough to stay resilient. Yet many small businesses aren’t prepared. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Verizon, 69% of small businesses don’t have a disaster plan in place.
To truly stay resilient, your business needs a layered approach to recovery – like all things in technology. More than that, you need to make sure your processes work as expected.
Your Backups Won’t Matter If They Don’t Work
Backups aren’t perfect. They can fail, become corrupted, miss important data, or simply not work when you need them.
According to a study by Avast, 60% of tested backups were incomplete, and another 50% of restores failed due to backup software issues. And even if your backup software reports a “successful backup,” that doesn’t necessarily mean the data can be restored.
And storing data strictly in the cloud doesn’t mean it’s always safe either.
While many SaaS providers automatically provide robust backup systems – Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and Salesforce, for example – they aren’t foolproof, and the resilience varies by application. When one of these applications experiences an outage, such as Azure’s 2025 prolonged outage, your data can become inaccessible when you need it most.
Businesses need to have multiple, monitored backups to guarantee their data is recoverable. Your business needs to know:
- What is being backed up?
- How often is it being backed up?
- Where are the backups stored?
- Are the backups completing successfully?
- Can the data be restored?
The last thing you want during a disaster is to find out that your backups haven’t been working for the past six months.
Disaster Readiness Means Regular Practice
You could spend all the money in the world on backup and disaster recovery, but if you don’t test your systems, it can all fail. Yet, according to a study by the Disaster Recovery Journal, only 35% of respondents said they updated their disaster recovery plan more than once a year.
That simply isn’t frequent enough. With over 600 million cyberattacks a day, not knowing if your recovery is up to date is a massive misstep. Even ignoring the risk of a cyberattack – which you really shouldn’t – your business is still changing constantly. Your employees, applications, infrastructure, data; none of it is static.
Your recovery strategy needs to reflect your business today, not your business six months ago.
Building a Backup and Recovery Strategy
As we’ve mentioned, a strong backup and recovery strategy consists of several systems working together to provide redundancy and resilience.
When building out your recovery strategy, here are three main things to consider:
1. Your RPO and RTO
RPO, or “recovery point objective,” is how much data your company can afford to lose. In other words, how far back are you willing to go to recover your data after a disaster?
Setting your backups at two-hour intervals would create an RPO of two hours. So, if a disaster struck one hour after your more recent backup, you would lose one hour of data.
RTO, or “recovery time objective,” is similar to RPO, but refers to how long your business can afford to be offline after a disaster.
If your company can exist offline for one hour without causing significant damage, your RTO would be one hour.
With your RPO and RTO established, you’ll have a much stronger idea of how your business can handle a disaster and how long you’ll need to recover.
2. The 3-2-1 Rule
When setting up your backups, we recommend using the 3-2-1 rule – the foundation for all strong backups.
The 3-2-1 rule consists of having:
- 3 copies of your data: This includes your original data and at least two copies. For example, you could have your original file on a business computer, a backup stored on a local backup device, and another stored in the cloud.
- 2 different forms of storage: By storing your data on two different places or types of storage, you increase redundancy. That could mean having one backup on a physical storage device in your office and another in the cloud. That way, one problem won’t affect the other.
- 1 copy kept off-site: Keeping one copy away from your physical location helps protect your data if something happens to your office. For example, if a fire or flood damages your office and equipment, an off-site backup means you can still recover your data.
You’ll want to tweak the 3-2-1 to fit your business and recovery needs. It’s a guideline, not a one-size-fits-all strategy. The important thing is making sure you have enough redundancy and protection so your data is always recoverable.
3. Your Business Continuity Plan
Everything should ultimately be covered in a comprehensive business continuity plan. This plan goes beyond RPO, RTO, and the 3-2-1 Rule. It covers:
- Who to contact during an emergency.
- Who will communicate with your customers about prolonged outages.
- What to prioritize during recovery.
- Your RTO and RPO.
- And everything else specific to your business’s backup, disaster recovery, and restoration process.
In short, a business continuity plan is a playbook for getting your business back on its feet as fast as possible.
How an MSP Helps Small Businesses With Their Backups & Recovery
If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, don’t worry. Backup and disaster recovery can be a lot for any business owner to tackle on their own. Which is why managed service providers (MSPs), like The 20 MSP, are here to help.
Here’s how:
They Plan and Monitor Your Backups
An MSP can offer expert guidance on what backup software to use, where to store your data, and how often your data should be backed up, while also helping establish your RPO and RTO.
That means you don’t have to guess what will work only to find out the solution you chose wasn’t the right one during a disaster.
Beyond helping you establish your backups, an MSP can monitor your backup system performance to make sure there aren’t any issues. If there is a problem with a backup, they can identify the issue, get it resolved, and get your recovery systems back in working order.
They Test Your Continuity Plan
Your MSP can also help you build and test your backup and disaster recovery plans to make sure they work as intended.
Even better, they’ll likely be part of your recovery team, which means less pressure on your employees and administration when a crisis hits.
When you have someone watching your backups, maintaining your recovery systems, and helping you prepare before a disaster happens, that’s how you achieve true peace of mind.
All you need is a partner you can trust.
The 20 MSP Gives You Peace of Mind
At The 20 MSP, we get how stressful it is to run a business. It’s why we do the work we do: to help people like you worry less about their technology.
And stressing about your backups and disaster recovery all the time? That’s no way to grow a business.
For one flat-rate, predictable fee (because the bill shouldn’t be stressful either), we’ll help turn the fear of potential disaster into confidence for the future.
Whether it’s managing your backups, improving your cyber security, or testing business continuity, we’ll make sure your business is always prepared.
So let’s get connected. We’d love to see how we can help your business grow with confidence.
FAQ
What is backup and disaster recovery?
Backup and disaster recovery is the process of protecting your business data and creating a plan for restoring it after a cyberattack, system failure, natural disaster, or other disruption.
Why is backup and disaster recovery important for small businesses?
A strong backup and disaster recovery strategy helps minimize downtime, protect important data, and give your business a clear path forward when something goes wrong.
How often should businesses test their backups?
Businesses should test their backups regularly – the exact timeframe will vary on the business – to make sure data can actually be restored when needed. Backup and disaster recovery plans should also be reviewed and updated whenever your systems, applications, or business needs change.
Is cloud storage alone enough for disaster recovery?
Not necessarily. While cloud storage can be an important part of a backup and disaster recovery strategy, relying on a single cloud or SaaS provider doesn’t guarantee that your data can be recovered when you need it.
Want more tips like this?
Subscribe using the form on the right and get our latest insights delivered straight to your inbox. Backup and Disaster Recovery
About The 20 MSP
As a leading provider of managed IT services, The 20 MSP serves thousands of businesses nationwide, providing each one with white-glove service, secure and streamlined IT infrastructure, and 24/7/365 dedicated IT support. We believe in building lasting relationships with clients founded on trust, communication, and the delivery of high-value services for a fair and predictable price. Our clients’ success is our success, and we are committed to helping each and every organization we serve leverage technology to secure a competitive advantage and achieve new growth.
