Backup & Disaster Recovery Planning: The Executive Guide to Business Continuity
(By Tom Hermstad, CEO of HD Tech — helping businesses stay operational when the unthinkable happens.)
A backup is simply a copy of your data. A disaster recovery (DR) plan is the detailed blueprint for using that data to get your entire business back online. You must have both. A backup without a recovery plan is like a lifeboat with no oars.
Because downtime kills more than servers—it kills revenue, reputation, and client trust. The average small-business outage costs over $9,000 per hour (IBM 2024). IT manages technology; executives manage business risk. Leaders must set the standard for resilience.
Backups must be daily. Recovery tests should be, at minimum, monthly. If you haven’t successfully restored data in the last 30 days, you aren’t protecting your business—you’re gambling with it.
The Executive's Guide to Real Continuity
When “We Have Backups” Isn’t Enough
Every executive breathes a little easier hearing, “Don’t worry, we have backups.”
That relief vanishes the day you learn those backups are corrupted, hopelessly outdated, or were encrypted along with everything else. That is the moment the gap between saving data and saving the company becomes painfully clear.
Real protection isn’t just about data; it’s about business continuity. This requires two things: redundancy and readiness.
- Backups protect your information.
- A Recovery Plan protects your operations, revenue, and reputation.
Both must work flawlessly under extreme pressure.
The Three Layers of Protection
A modern continuity strategy is built on three essential layers:
- Automated, Verified Backups Your backups must be automated—no human reminder required. They should be encrypted both in transit and at rest. Most importantly, they must be verified. An automated process should confirm daily that the files are complete and uncorrupted.
- Off-Site and Offline Copies You must maintain at least one backup copy that is physically off-site and, crucially, disconnected from your network (air-gapped). When ransomware hits, it aggressively seeks out and encrypts all connected backups. An offline copy is your only guaranteed fallback.
- A Documented Disaster Recovery Process This is your playbook. It must spell out, step-by-step, how you restore systems. It defines who acts first, which critical systems come online in what order, and how you communicate with clients and staff. An untested plan is not a plan; it’s a hypothesis.
The Executive’s Perspective: From Crisis to Process
This isn’t just an IT issue; it’s a core business-leadership function.
- CEOs: You are protecting the company’s reputation and the client trust you’ve spent years building.
- CFOs: You are managing the profound financial impact of downtime and mitigating the risk of a catastrophic financial event.
- COOs: You are ensuring operational continuity so the business can continue to function and serve clients when systems fail.
A strong recovery plan transforms chaos into a checklist. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s predictability under pressure.
What a Modern Backup & Recovery Plan Includes
A comprehensive plan, or “playbook,” must define:
- RPO & RTO Targets: Define your Recovery Point Objective (RPO: how much data you can afford to lose) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO: how fast you must be back online).
- Cloud Replication: Mirroring key data and systems to a secure, independent cloud location for rapid restoration.
- Hardware Inventory: Knowing exactly which machines are critical and how they will be replaced.
- Communication Plan: A clear chain of command for contacting staff, clients, and vendors during an incident.
- ccTesting Schedule: Regular, quarterly recovery drills to prove the plan works and train your team.
Why HD Tech Clients Stay Standing
We provide our clients with true business continuity through three pillars of service:
- Proven Continuity Planning: We don’t just back up data. We build, test, and maintain custom recovery playbooks designed for your specific business.
- Hybrid Backup Architecture: We combine the speed of local backups with the security of redundant cloud and offline copies.
- 24/7 Monitoring & Alerts: We catch data-integrity and backup failures before they become a business-level problem.
Client Testimonial: “When a power surge fried our primary server, HD Tech had us fully operational from our backup systems in six hours. There was no data loss and no panic. They just executed the plan.” — Operations Director, Logistics Firm
Executive Checklist: Your Continuity Baseline
- Are all your critical systems backed up daily and tested monthly?
- Do you have an off-site, offline (air-gapped) copy of your backups?
- Is your recovery plan fully documented, assigning clear ownership to specific people?
- Have you simulated a full-scale disaster recovery in the last six months?
- Can you recover 100% of your critical client data without paying a ransom?
If you can’t answer “yes” to all five, your business has a critical vulnerability.
Your Cybersecurity Questions, Answered
No. File-syncing services are not backups. If a file is deleted or encrypted by ransomware on your laptop, it’s deleted or encrypted in the cloud, too. You need independent, versioned backups that are separate from your primary systems.
We recommend at least 90 days for standard operational data. However, if your business is in a regulated industry (like finance, healthcare, or legal), you may be required to keep archives for several years. We help clients set retention policies that match their compliance needs.
For most HD Tech clients, we restore core operations within 4 to 8 hours. Without a tested plan, companies can take days or even weeks to recover, often suffering catastrophic data loss in the process.
Yes. We use “sandboxed” or staged test environments. This allows us to perform a full restore and verify data integrity without ever touching your live, production systems.
We always begin with a Business Impact Assessment. We work with your leadership to map your critical systems, define your RTO/RPO targets, and identify your greatest risks. From there, we design a custom continuity plan that keeps your team productive no matter what.
Let’s make your business unbreakable.
HD Tech partners with Orange County businesses to build proven backup and recovery systems that never fail under pressure.
Reach out to our executive team today to start your custom continuity plan.
H&D Technologies, LLC
322 Main Street, Suite 4
Seal Beach, CA 90740
