Mount Pleasant · Kenosha · Milwaukee, WI | Serving clients in 29 states
Mount Pleasant · Kenosha · Milwaukee, WI | Serving clients in 29 states
Part of the managed relationship
Most organizations have backups running. Far fewer know how long a full recovery would actually take, or whether the last one worked. We test the restore, document the plan, and make sure a bad day stays a bad day rather than becoming an existential one.
Where a plan actually starts
Before any discussion of software or storage, a recovery plan is defined by what you can afford to lose and how long you can afford to be down. Answer these two and the technical choices mostly answer themselves.
RPO · Recovery Point Objective
If your last usable backup is from midnight and something fails at 4pm, you have lost a day of work. Every order, every entry, every document created in between has to be reconstructed from memory and paper — if it can be reconstructed at all.
How often we take a copy is a direct answer to this question, and it is a business decision rather than a technical one.
A dental practice can usually rebuild a morning of scheduling. A distributor running continuous order entry usually cannot.
RPO · Recovery Point Objective
Having a copy of your data is not the same as being able to work again. Recovery means rebuilding systems, restoring data, verifying it and getting people logged back in — and the honest answer is often measured in days, not hours, unless someone has planned otherwise.
This is the number most organizations have never actually measured, and it is usually the one that surprises them.
A team of 40 down for three days is roughly 120 lost working days, before you count the customers who called during it.
We work these out with you first, then design backup and recovery to hit them — rather than installing a product and hoping the numbers land somewhere acceptable.
What’s included
Scheduled copies of your servers, files and cloud data at a frequency set by your RPO, running without anyone remembering to start them.
Copies held away from your primary environment, so a problem that reaches your systems does not automatically reach your only means of recovery.
CCB’s backup plans include test restores of backed-up data, so you know it comes back usable. A backup nobody has ever restored is an assumption, not a safeguard.
Written, current, and specific to your environment: what gets restored, in what order, by whom, and who gets told what while it happens.
Microsoft protects its platform, not your content. Deleted mail, files and SharePoint data need their own backup, and most organizations assume otherwise.
Backup jobs are monitored the way the rest of your environment is. A silent failure gets caught in days, not discovered during a recovery.
Why the plan matters
Same failure, two organizations. The gap between them is entirely decided before anything goes wrong.
With a tested plan
Hour 0
Failure detected by monitoring. The documented plan is opened.
Hour 1
Priority systems identified in advance start restoring. Staff are told what to expect.
Same day
Core systems back. People are working, on a known and verified data set.
Day 2
Remaining systems restored. Written review of what happened and what changes.
Hour 1
Hour 0
Someone notices something is wrong. Nobody is certain who owns the response.
Day 1
Time goes on establishing what backups exist, how old they are, and whether they are usable.
Day 2–3
Restores attempted. Gaps found. Priority order argued about while everyone is idle.
After
Work between the last good backup and the failure is reconstructed by hand, if at all.
24/7
Monitoring, including backup jobs
35
Years supporting SMB environments
How we build it
01
We work out your RPO and RTO with you — what you can afford to lose, and how long you can afford to be down.
02
Backup frequency, where copies are held and how recovery runs are chosen to meet those numbers, not the other way around.
03
Written and specific: restore order, responsibilities, communication. Something a person can follow on a bad morning.
04
Periodic restores confirm it works, and the plan gets updated as your systems and your business change.
How this fits
Monitoring reduces how often something serious happens. Recovery decides what it costs you when it does. Treating them separately is how organizations end up well defended and badly prepared.
Cloud security, SIEM monitoring and managed detection & response — the other half of the same conversation.
Where a lot of your data now lives — and where the gap between platform protection and actual backup catches people out.
The relationship this sits inside. Monitoring, service desk, infrastructure and planning under one agreement.
In their words
“They clearly communicate what they are doing and how they are doing it.”
That helps us know how to prevent an issue from occurring again. Working with them gives me the data I need to present a case for future IT upgrades and projects.
Neil Fleischhacker · Senior Manager of IT & Facilities, Precision Plus
Common questions
Backup is having a copy of your data; disaster recovery is being able to work again. The distinction matters because organizations with working backups routinely discover that a full recovery takes days, because nobody planned the sequence, the responsibilities or the systems the data has to be restored onto.
A complete arrangement covers both: copies you can trust, and a documented plan for turning those copies back into a functioning business.
RPO is how much data you can afford to lose, and RTO is how long you can afford to be down. Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective are the full terms.
They are business decisions rather than technical ones, and they determine everything else — how often backups run, where copies are held, and how recovery is designed. CCB establishes both with you before recommending any particular approach.
Backups should be restore-tested on a regular schedule, because a backup that has never been restored is an assumption rather than a safeguard. Silent failures are common: jobs report success while producing something that cannot actually be recovered from.
CCB’s backup plans include test restores, and backup jobs are monitored with alerts to the right contacts when one fails.
No, not in the way most organizations assume. Microsoft protects the platform’s availability, but the content in your tenant, including email, files, SharePoint and Teams data, remains your responsibility, and retention periods for deleted items are limited.
This is one of the most common gaps CCB finds during an assessment. CCB offers Microsoft 365 backup as part of its managed services.
Recovery from a ransomware incident depends almost entirely on whether isolated, verified backups exist before it happens. Where they do, systems can be rebuilt and data restored from a known-good point; where the only copies were reachable from the affected environment, options are severely limited.
This is why CCB holds copies away from the primary environment and verifies restores, rather than relying on backups that sit in the same place as the systems they protect.
Recovery time depends on your RTO target, the size of your environment and how the plan was designed — which is precisely why it is worth establishing the number in advance rather than discovering it during an incident.
Organizations without a documented plan commonly find that full recovery takes days. With priority order agreed and restores verified in advance, core systems typically come back considerably faster.
Backup and disaster recovery is one of CCB’s managed services, delivered under a managed services agreement. Microsoft 365 data in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive is backed up as part of Cloud Security, because Microsoft’s 30-day retention is not a backup strategy. File and folder backups are part of Endpoint Management & Security.
The specific scope, including which systems, what frequency and what recovery targets, is agreed during onboarding after the initial assessment.
In many cases yes. Where an existing arrangement already meets your recovery targets, the sensible step is usually to verify it works and document the recovery plan around it rather than replace it.
Where it does not meet the targets, we will show you specifically where the gap is before recommending any change.
Let’s talk
Thirty minutes, no obligation. Most organizations have never measured it, and the answer is worth knowing before something makes you find out.
