Backup strategy
Automated snapshots and logical dumps to a separate account or region, with encryption, immutability and a schedule matched to your tolerance for loss.
Reliability & Performance
Backup, HA & Disaster Recovery
Recovery procedures that have been tested, with RTO and RPO written down.
The work
What this actually does
Every organisation has backups. Far fewer have restored one recently enough to know they still work, and almost none can say how long a full recovery would take. We design the failover and backup arrangements, then rehearse the restore until the numbers in the plan match the numbers you observe.
Work starts with a conversation about acceptable loss: how much data can you afford to lose, and how long can a critical service be down before it becomes a business problem. Those two answers set the target and the budget, and they decide whether you need warm standby in a second region or simply a faster restore from object storage.
If any of these sound familiar
- Nobody knows if the backups actually restore
- Recovery time is a guess written in a wiki
- A whole region failing would take the platform down
- Database failover has never been tested under load
Scope
What's included
Every engagement on this page covers the following, sized to your setup rather than delivered as a fixed package. If something here is not relevant to you, it comes off the scope and off the price.
High availability design
Multi-AZ and multi-region topology for the components that cannot stop, including load balancers, queues and the database layer that holds state.
Restore rehearsals
We restore into an isolated environment on a schedule, time the whole exercise, and record the result against the recovery objective it is meant to prove.
Failover runbooks
Step-by-step procedures for promoting a replica or shifting traffic, written for someone tired at four in the morning rather than for an architect.
RTO and RPO targets
Agreed recovery time and recovery point objectives per service, graded by importance so a reporting tool is not held to the same standard as checkout.
Recovery evidence pack
Dated records of every rehearsal, including what failed and how long each stage took, which doubles as the evidence auditors ask for.
What changes
What teams typically see
4 hoursTypical recovery time objective
15 minTypical recovery point objective
quarterlyRestore rehearsal schedule
Handover
What you keep
Everything produced during the engagement is yours: the repositories, the accounts, the documentation. There is no proprietary layer and nothing to unlicense if you take the work in-house.
- Recovery plan with RTO and RPO per service
- Automated backup configuration under version control
- Tested failover runbook for the database tier
- Rehearsal report with timings and failure notes
- Immutability and access policy for backup data
Tooling
Tools we use here
A starting point, not a requirement. We work in whatever you already run wherever it does the job.
AWS
Microsoft Azure
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
Kubernetes
Terraform
Redis
How it runs
From first call to handover
The same four steps on every engagement. You see each one before it starts and can stop at any of them.
- 01
Agree the loss tolerance
We sit down with the service owners and decide, per system, how much data loss and downtime is genuinely acceptable before the business is harmed.
- 02
Design the recovery path
We choose between multi-region active-active, warm standby and restore-from-backup based on cost, complexity and the objectives we just agreed.
- 03
Implement and automate
Backups, replication and the failover steps become code wherever the platform allows, so recovery does not depend on one person remembering a sequence.
- 04
Rehearse and report
We run the first restore with your team watching, time each stage, and leave a written report with the gaps and the fixes for next quarter.
Questions
Asked before we start
Our backups run fine. Why rehearse restores?
Because a backup job reporting success only proves the copy was written, not that it can be read back and returned to service. Restores fail for boring reasons — missing keys, wrong permissions, schema drift — and rehearsals find those before a real outage does.
Do we need a second region?
Often not, and it is the most expensive answer. We size the requirement from the agreed objectives: many services are fine with multi-AZ and fast restore, and only a handful justify the cost of continuous replication elsewhere.
How do you avoid backups being deleted by an attacker?
Immutable and versioned storage in a separate account, with credentials the production estate cannot reach. We also alert on unusual deletion activity, because the fastest recovery path is one that nobody has tampered with.
How often should we test recovery?
Quarterly is a reasonable default for critical systems, and annually for the long tail. If a rehearsal fails, the next one moves sooner. The schedule matters less than actually doing it and writing down the result.
Reliability & Performance
Often needed alongside this
Networking & Data
Database DevOps & Data Migrations
Schema changes shipped through the pipeline with rollback plans, rather than run by hand at midnight.
- Versioned migrations in CI/CD with review
- Zero-downtime, expand-contract schema changes
- Replication, failover and read-scaling design
Platform & Containers
Kubernetes & Containers
Production-grade clusters with sane defaults, safe rollouts and an operator experience your team will actually enjoy.
- EKS, AKS, GKE and self-managed clusters
- Helm, Kustomize and GitOps-driven deployments
- Node autoscaling, resource tuning and cost control
Reliability & Performance
Monitoring & Observability
Know what broke, why it broke and who it affects — before your customers have to tell you.
- Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog & CloudWatch
- OpenTelemetry tracing and structured logging
- SLO dashboards and actionable alert routing
Worth a conversation about Backup, HA & Disaster Recovery?
Bring the specific problem. We will tell you honestly whether this is the service that fixes it, and what it would take.