Everyone has a recovery plan. Ask them when it was last run.
A plan in a folder is a hope. We write yours, rehearse it on a schedule, time it, and hand you the result, so the number you give your board is one somebody has actually measured.
- Recovery time, in your contract
- Agreed
- Recovery time, in your contract
- In a rehearsal, not estimated
- Measured
- In a rehearsal, not estimated
- On a schedule, with a report
- Rehearsed
- On a schedule, with a report
Rehearsed, timed and written up
Your recovery time, measured
The difference
Backup is your data. Disaster recovery is your business running.
A backup gets your files back eventually. Disaster recovery decides whether eventually is two hours or two weeks. They are not two tiers of one product. They answer different questions, and most businesses need both.
| The server dies at 9am | With backup alone | With disaster recovery |
|---|---|---|
| What happens next | Source hardware, rebuild, restore, reconfigure, test | You declare, we fail over, staff carry on somewhere else |
| Realistic time to working | 3–10 working days | Based on the agreed recovery time objective (RTO), as per your signed agreement |
| Who does the work | You, or whoever you can get hold of | Us, following the runbook we rehearsed with you |
| What you tell customers | “We are working on it.” | “We are on our secondary site. Nothing lost since 09:00.” |
The arithmetic
Work out what one day costs you.
Staff who cannot work. Orders you cannot take. The service level you owe your own customers. The overtime to catch up afterwards. Multiply that by how long a rebuild really takes: sourcing hardware, reinstalling, restoring, reconfiguring, testing. For most businesses without a plan, that is three to ten working days.
Disaster recovery is worth buying at the point where that number exceeds a year of standby. For some businesses it never does, and we will tell you so rather than sell it to you. For a hospital, a manufacturer, or anyone with a regulator, it usually does on day one.
Downtime cost calculator
Staff who stop when the system stops.
Salary plus overheads, roughly.
What you cannot sell, bill or deliver while you are down.
Three to ten working days is typical without a plan.
Your estimate
KES 400,000
for a 5-day outage. Every extra day adds KES 80,000.
An estimate from your own figures, not an actual loss. It leaves out penalties, overtime and customers who do not come back. With disaster recovery, recovery time is the RTO agreed in your contract instead.
We will check these numbers against your real systems.
The rehearsal
A plan you have watched work.
Any provider will write you a recovery plan. Very few will run it while nothing is wrong. We fail your systems over in a planned window, time it, prove the applications actually come up, then fail back. You get the report with the real number in it.
We schedule it
On the schedule in your agreement, at a time that does not interrupt your week. You know it is coming.
We time it
Start to usable, measured, not estimated. That figure goes in the report and into next year's contract.
We prove the applications come up
Not just that a machine boots, but that your accounting system, your database and your shares are actually usable.
We write down what went wrong
If a rehearsal fails, we found it in a planned window instead of a real one. That is the entire point of doing it.
The rehearsal report is also the evidence your auditor, your insurer or your regulator asks for. Most businesses have nothing to hand them.
What you get
Somewhere to run, and a rehearsed way to get there.
A standby copy that is ready to start
Your critical systems are replicated to our infrastructure and kept current, so recovery means starting a machine rather than rebuilding one.
A runbook written before the bad day
Which systems come up in what order, what changes, who authorises the failover, who calls your staff and your customers.
Recovery targets in the contract
How long until you are running and how much data you could lose, agreed per system before you sign, along with what happens if we miss.
Failback that is planned too
Getting back to your own site cleanly, without causing a second outage, is part of the same runbook.
One number, day or night
A declared disaster reaches a named engineer, including at 3am on a public holiday.
Backup underneath all of it
Every disaster recovery arrangement includes the full backup service. You do not buy it twice.
How we build it
Five steps, and the first one is the valuable one.
Step 1
Assess
We list your systems and, for each, you tell us how long it can be down and how much data you could stand to lose. It is usually the first time anyone has asked.
Step 2
Design
We propose the smallest arrangement that meets those numbers, and say plainly which systems do not justify disaster recovery at all.
Step 3
Replicate
Standby copies start flowing. No change to how your systems run day to day.
Step 4
Rehearse
We fail over in a planned window and time it. You get the runbook and the result in writing.
Step 5
Stand ready
Monitored continuously, rehearsed on schedule, and reviewed whenever your environment changes.
Who this is for
And who it is not for.
We would rather tell you now than sell you standby you will never use.
Worth it
- Anyone who owes someone else a service level. You cannot promise uptime you have no plan to deliver.
- Regulated businesses. Hospitals, clinics, savings co-operatives and insurers: the runbook and the rehearsal report are the evidence.
- Manufacturing and logistics. Where a stopped system stops physical work and the cost is measurable by the hour.
- Anyone who has already had one. The second conversation is always easier than the first.
Probably not worth it yet
- A business that can work on paper for a few days without losing customers.
- Systems with no live data, such as a website that can be rebuilt from a repository.
- Anywhere the cost of a week's downtime is genuinely lower than a year of standby. We will do that sum with you.
In plain English
The words you will hear in every DR proposal.
| The word | What it means | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| RTO | Recovery time objective: how long until people are working again. | Is that measured from a rehearsal, or estimated? |
| RPO | Recovery point objective: how much work you would lose. | Is it the same for every system? |
| Failover | Switching your systems over to run somewhere else. | Who is allowed to declare it, and how long does it take? |
| Failback | Moving back to your own site afterwards. | Is that planned too, or improvised? |
| Runbook | The written steps, in order, with names against them. | Can I see one you have actually used? |
| Standby | The capacity held ready for you, which is what you are paying for. | Warm or hot, and what is the difference in my bill? |
| Replication | Keeping the standby copy continuously up to date. | How far behind is it at any moment? |
Common questions
Before you ask us.
- Do we have to move our systems to you?
- No. Your systems stay where they are. We hold the standby copy and take over only when you declare.
- Who decides to fail over?
- You do, by a named person, using a process agreed in the runbook. We can recommend it, but we do not switch your business over on our own judgement.
- What if the rehearsal fails?
- Then we found it in a planned window instead of a real one. You get the report, we fix it, and we test again.
- Can you do this if our servers are on someone else's cloud?
- Yes. On-premise, our VPSs, or another provider's.
- How is this billed differently from backup?
- Backup is priced on how much data you protect. Disaster recovery is priced on how fast you need to be back, because that decides the standby capacity reserved for you. Every DR arrangement includes backup.
Find out what your recovery time actually is.
The assessment takes 90 minutes and costs nothing. We list your critical systems, work out how long each would really take to bring back with what you have now, and put a number on it in writing. Most people are surprised, and the surprise is the point.
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