Backup and Disaster Recovery That Guarantees Your Business Survives
Ransomware encrypts your entire environment at 2:00 a.m. on a Friday. A hurricane floods your server room. A disgruntled employee deletes critical databases. When disaster strikes, the only question that matters is: how fast can you recover? Petronella Technology Group, Inc. delivers enterprise backup and disaster recovery with immutable, air-gapped backups, defined RTO/RPO guarantees, and tested recovery procedures that prove your business can come back online — not someday, but within hours. Thirty years of protecting Raleigh-Triangle businesses. Zero data losses among clients following our backup program.
BBB Accredited Since 2003 • Founded 2002 • 2,500+ Clients Served • Zero Breaches Among Clients Following Our Security Program
The Threats Your Backups Must Survive
60 percent of small businesses that lose their data shut down within six months. Your backup strategy is your business continuity strategy.
Ransomware-Proof Immutable Backups
Modern ransomware actively targets backup systems before encrypting production data. Our immutable backup architecture uses air-gapped storage, WORM (Write Once Read Many) technology, and isolated recovery environments that attackers cannot reach, encrypt, or delete. Even if ransomware compromises your entire network, your backups remain intact and recoverable. This is the difference between paying a ransom and restoring from clean backups.
Defined RTO and RPO Guarantees
Recovery Time Objective tells you how fast you are back online. Recovery Point Objective tells you how much data you can afford to lose. We define both during planning, engineer the backup architecture to meet them, and prove they work through regular testing. Your leadership team and your auditors get documented guarantees — not vague promises that recovery will happen eventually.
Compliance-Grade Retention Policies
HIPAA requires six years. SOC 2 requires defined retention aligned to policy. CMMC and DFARS mandate specific backup and recovery controls for CUI. We configure retention policies that satisfy your specific regulatory requirements, automate lifecycle management so old backups are purged on schedule, and maintain the documentation auditors expect.
Tested Recovery, Not Just Backups
A backup that has never been tested is not a backup — it is a hope. We conduct regular recovery testing: full restores, bare-metal recoveries, VM failovers, and application-level recovery validation. Every test is documented with restore times, data integrity verification, and gap analysis. You know your backups work because we prove it, not because we assume it.
Why Most Backup Strategies Fail When They Are Needed Most
The majority of organizations discover their backup strategy is inadequate only after a disaster has already occurred. The backup ran every night and the dashboard showed green checkmarks. But when ransomware encrypted everything and the team tried to restore, they discovered the backup had been silently failing for weeks. Or the backup worked, but restoring a full server environment takes 72 hours — and the business cannot survive 72 hours of downtime. Or the backup data was stored on the same network the attackers compromised, so it was encrypted along with everything else.
These are not hypothetical scenarios. Petronella Technology Group, Inc. has responded to hundreds of disaster recovery incidents over 30+ years in the Raleigh-Durham Triangle, and the pattern is consistent: organizations have backups that they have never tested, stored in locations that are not secure, with recovery procedures that do not exist or do not work. The backup software vendor sold them a product. Nobody sold them a recovery strategy.
Our approach is fundamentally different. We start by understanding your business requirements: which systems are mission-critical, how much downtime your operations can tolerate, how much data loss is acceptable, what compliance frameworks govern your data retention, and what your budget allows. Then we design a backup and disaster recovery architecture that meets those specific requirements — not a one-size-fits-all product installation, but an engineered solution tailored to your environment.
The architecture typically includes multiple backup tiers: local backup for fast recovery of individual files and databases, offsite replication for protection against facility-level disasters, and immutable air-gapped backup copies that survive even the most sophisticated ransomware attacks. Each tier serves a specific purpose in the recovery strategy, and together they provide defense-in-depth for your data. We use the same layered approach to data protection that we apply to cybersecurity — because backup is a security control, not just an IT operations task.
Ransomware has fundamentally changed the backup landscape. Modern ransomware variants like LockBit, BlackCat, and Cl0p specifically target backup infrastructure before encrypting production systems. They delete shadow copies, encrypt backup repositories, compromise backup admin credentials, and disable backup agents. If your backup strategy was designed before the ransomware era, it is almost certainly vulnerable. Our immutable backup architecture ensures that even if an attacker gains domain admin privileges and full network access, your backup data remains untouchable in air-gapped, write-once storage that cannot be modified or deleted by any network-connected system.
Cloud backup is an essential component of any modern strategy, and we support backup to and from all major platforms. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace data is not backed up by Microsoft or Google — a fact that surprises most organizations. If an employee deletes a SharePoint site, an Exchange mailbox, or a Google Drive folder, it is gone after the vendor's limited retention period expires. We implement third-party backup for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace that provides granular restore capability, legal hold support, and compliance-grade retention independent of the cloud vendor's native recycle bin.
Disaster recovery extends beyond backup. A complete DR strategy includes documented recovery procedures for every critical system, contact trees and communication plans, alternate work arrangements for employees, vendor notification procedures, insurance coordination, and regular testing to prove the plan works. Petronella Technology Group, Inc. develops comprehensive disaster recovery plans that address the full spectrum of disruptions — from a single server failure to a complete facility loss — and we test those plans annually with documented results.
For organizations that need continuous availability, we design and manage failover architectures that minimize or eliminate downtime during a disaster. VM replication keeps standby copies of critical servers ready to activate in minutes. Database replication maintains synchronized copies across geographically separate locations. DNS failover automatically redirects traffic from a failed primary site to a recovery site. These are not theoretical capabilities — they are production architectures we manage for healthcare organizations, financial services firms, defense contractors, and technology companies across the Triangle.
Our managed IT services clients receive backup and disaster recovery as an integrated part of their infrastructure management, ensuring that backup policies stay current as systems change. For organizations that manage their own IT, we offer standalone backup and DR services with the same enterprise-grade protection and testing rigor. Either way, you get a backup strategy designed by engineers who have recovered businesses from real disasters — not a software installation from a vendor who has never been in a recovery room at 3:00 a.m.
Compliance requirements increasingly mandate specific backup and disaster recovery controls. HIPAA requires contingency planning and data backup procedures. SOC 2 evaluates backup and recovery as part of the availability trust service criterion. CMMC and DFARS require recovery controls for CUI. PCI DSS mandates regular testing of recovery procedures. We map every backup and DR control to your specific compliance frameworks and maintain the documentation that assessors expect, so your backup program supports your compliance program instead of creating gaps.
Petronella Technology Group, Inc. has been protecting business data since 2002. We have maintained a zero data loss record among clients following our backup program through hurricanes, ransomware attacks, hardware failures, human errors, and every other disruption the last two decades have produced. With cloud, on-premises, and hybrid backup strategies, BBB A+ accreditation since 2003, and a team that has recovered businesses from real disasters hundreds of times, we deliver backup and disaster recovery that works when it matters most.
Enterprise Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions
Every organization has different recovery requirements. We engineer backup and DR solutions that match your specific RTO, RPO, compliance, and budget needs.
Automated Backup with Offsite Replication
Our core backup service provides automated daily backups of servers, workstations, databases, and applications with encrypted replication to a geographically separate facility. Backups run on defined schedules — typically nightly for full backups and hourly or continuous for critical databases — with automated verification that confirms backup integrity after every job. Failed backups trigger immediate alerts to our monitoring team, not a silent log entry nobody reads.
Offsite replication ensures your data survives facility-level disasters: fire, flood, hurricane, or total building loss. Encrypted data transfers between sites use AES-256 encryption in transit and at rest. Retention policies are configured to your compliance requirements and business needs, with automated lifecycle management that purges expired backups on schedule. Grandfather-father-son retention provides daily, weekly, monthly, and annual restore points.
For organizations with large datasets, we optimize backup windows through deduplication, compression, and incremental-forever strategies that minimize network bandwidth requirements and storage costs while maintaining comprehensive restore capability.
Immutable and Air-Gapped Backup Protection
Standard backups stored on network-accessible storage are vulnerable to ransomware. Immutable backups solve this problem by writing backup data to storage that physically cannot be modified or deleted for a defined retention period, regardless of what credentials an attacker compromises. Air-gapped backups go further by isolating backup storage from all network connectivity, creating a physical barrier that no software attack can cross.
Our immutable backup architecture uses WORM-compliant storage, object lock technology, and isolated recovery environments. Even if an attacker gains domain admin access, compromises the backup server, and deletes every online backup copy, the immutable tier remains intact and unmodified. Recovery from immutable backups uses a clean, isolated environment to prevent re-infection during restore.
This is the backup tier that lets you say no to ransom demands. When the attacker encrypts your environment and demands payment, you point to your immutable backups and begin recovery. No negotiation, no payment, no uncertainty.
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace Backup
Microsoft and Google operate under a shared responsibility model: they keep the platform running, but protecting your data is your responsibility. Microsoft 365 retains deleted items for 14 to 93 days depending on the service. Google Workspace retains deleted items for 25 days. After that, your data is gone permanently. No support ticket, no escalation, no recovery option from the vendor.
Our cloud backup service provides independent, third-party backup of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Shared Drives. Backups run multiple times daily with point-in-time restore capability. You can recover individual emails, files, folders, entire mailboxes, complete SharePoint sites, or Teams channels — granularity that the native recycle bin cannot match. Legal hold and eDiscovery support ensures you can meet litigation preservation requirements without relying on the cloud vendor's native retention.
Backup data is stored in our infrastructure, encrypted and fully under your control. If you ever change cloud vendors — moving from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace or vice versa — your historical backup data remains accessible and recoverable.
Disaster Recovery Planning and Testing
A disaster recovery plan is only as good as its last test. We develop comprehensive DR plans that document recovery procedures for every critical system, define roles and responsibilities, establish communication chains, and specify the exact steps to restore operations after any disruption — from a single server failure to a complete facility loss.
Annual DR testing exercises the full recovery process: bare-metal server restores, VM failovers, database recovery with integrity validation, application testing, and user acceptance. Testing is documented with measured recovery times, data integrity verification results, gap identification, and improvement recommendations. The test report satisfies auditor requirements for HIPAA, SOC 2, CMMC, and PCI DSS, and it gives your executive team evidence-based confidence that the business can survive a worst-case scenario.
Between annual tests, we conduct monthly backup verification, quarterly restore spot-checks, and continuous monitoring of backup success rates. Your DR readiness is not something we check once a year and forget — it is continuously validated.
Bare-Metal Recovery and VM Replication
When a physical server fails catastrophically, you need to restore not just data but the entire operating environment: operating system, drivers, applications, configurations, and data. Bare-metal recovery rebuilds a complete server from backup onto new hardware — or different hardware — without manual OS installation, application reinstallation, or configuration recreation. This cuts recovery time from days to hours.
For virtualized environments, VM replication maintains continuously synchronized copies of critical virtual machines at a secondary site. When the primary fails, the replica activates in minutes with near-zero data loss. We configure replication intervals based on your RPO requirements — from every 15 minutes for critical databases to daily for less time-sensitive systems. Failover testing validates that replicas boot correctly and applications function before you need them in a real disaster.
These capabilities are essential for organizations with tight RTO requirements. If your business cannot afford hours of downtime, VM replication and bare-metal recovery are the technologies that deliver minutes-to-recovery instead of days-to-recovery.
Hybrid Backup Strategies
The optimal backup strategy for most organizations combines on-premises, cloud, and immutable tiers into a hybrid architecture that balances recovery speed, protection depth, and cost. Local backup appliances provide fastest recovery for the most common scenarios: accidental deletion, corruption, and hardware failure. Cloud backup provides geographic separation for facility-level disasters. Immutable air-gapped storage provides ransomware-proof protection.
We design hybrid strategies based on your data classification: mission-critical systems get all three tiers with aggressive RPO targets, important systems get local and cloud backup, and archival data gets cost-optimized cold storage with longer recovery windows. This tiered approach ensures critical systems recover in minutes while keeping overall backup costs manageable.
Whether your infrastructure is on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid, we build a unified backup strategy that covers everything with consistent policies, centralized monitoring, and a single team responsible for protecting all your data regardless of where it lives.
Building a Backup and DR Program That Actually Works
A proven methodology that has protected 2,500+ clients through every kind of disaster the last three decades have produced.
Backup Assessment and Risk Analysis
We inventory every system, application, and data store in your environment. We identify what is currently backed up, what is not, where gaps exist, and what the actual recovery capability is versus what leadership assumes it to be. We conduct a business impact analysis to classify systems by criticality and define RTO/RPO requirements for each tier. The assessment also evaluates ransomware resilience: can your current backups survive a sophisticated attack that targets backup infrastructure?
Timeline: 1-2 weeks • Deliverable: Backup Gap Analysis and Recovery Requirements Document
Architecture Design and Deployment
Based on the assessment, we design a multi-tier backup architecture that meets your specific RTO, RPO, compliance, and budget requirements. We deploy backup agents, configure schedules, set up offsite replication, configure immutable storage tiers, implement monitoring and alerting, and run initial full backups with verification. Every component is documented: what is backed up, when, where, how, and how to restore it.
Timeline: 2-4 weeks • Deliverable: Fully Deployed and Tested Backup Infrastructure
DR Plan Development and Initial Test
We develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan covering every critical system, define recovery procedures, assign roles and responsibilities, establish communication chains, and document step-by-step recovery runbooks. Then we execute the first full DR test: bare-metal restores, VM failovers, database recoveries, application validation, and user acceptance testing. The test report documents measured recovery times and identifies any gaps requiring remediation.
Timeline: 2-3 weeks • Deliverable: DR Plan Document and Initial Test Report
Ongoing Monitoring, Testing, and Optimization
Backups are monitored 24/7 with automated alerts for failures, capacity warnings, and anomalies. Monthly backup health reports cover success rates, storage utilization, and compliance status. Quarterly restore spot-checks validate random backup sets. Annual full DR tests prove recovery capability and update the DR plan for infrastructure changes. As your environment evolves — new servers, new applications, new compliance requirements — we update the backup architecture to keep protection comprehensive and current.
Timeline: Ongoing (monthly reports, quarterly spot-checks, annual DR test) • Deliverable: Backup Health Reports and Annual DR Test Documentation
30+ Years of Recovering Businesses from Real Disasters
Most backup vendors sell you software and walk away. They have never been in a recovery room at 3:00 a.m. with a client whose entire environment is encrypted and the business is losing revenue every minute. Petronella Technology Group, Inc. has been in that room hundreds of times over three decades — and we have never lost a client's data when they followed our backup program.
Our team combines deep cybersecurity expertise with infrastructure operations experience. We understand how attackers target backups because we investigate breaches and respond to ransomware incidents. We design backup architectures that survive the attacks we have seen in the field — not theoretical threats from a vendor whitepaper, but real-world attack patterns from actual incident response engagements.
Craig Petronella, Founder & CEO
Licensed Digital Forensic Examiner • CMMC Certified Registered Practitioner • 30+ Years in Data Protection
Craig has led disaster recovery efforts for healthcare systems, defense contractors, financial institutions, and critical infrastructure operators for more than three decades. His forensic investigation experience informs how Petronella Technology Group, Inc. designs backup architectures — because understanding how attackers destroy data is essential to building backup systems that survive attacks.
Our Track Record
Related: Cybersecurity
Backup is your last line of defense. Prevent disasters in the first place with our cybersecurity services including threat detection, incident response, and ransomware prevention.
Related: Managed Hosting
Host your infrastructure in our SOC 2 Type II data center with integrated backup and DR. Our managed hosting and colocation includes enterprise backup by default.
Related: CMMC Compliance
Need backup and DR that satisfies CMMC assessment requirements? Our CMMC compliance services ensure your data protection meets every required practice.
Backup and Disaster Recovery FAQs
How often should backups run?
It depends on your RPO — how much data you can afford to lose. If losing more than one hour of data is unacceptable, backups run at least hourly. If losing a full day is tolerable, nightly backups are sufficient. For critical databases, we typically configure continuous transaction log backup with 15-minute intervals. For file servers and general workloads, nightly full or incremental backups are standard. We define the optimal schedule during the assessment based on your business requirements, data change rates, and infrastructure capacity.
What makes your backups ransomware-proof?
Three layers of protection. First, immutable storage: backup data is written to WORM-compliant storage that physically prevents modification or deletion for a defined retention period. No credentials, no admin access, no exploit can change immutable data. Second, air-gapped isolation: at least one backup tier is completely disconnected from your network, creating a physical barrier no software attack can cross. Third, isolated recovery: when we restore from immutable backups, we use a clean, isolated environment to prevent re-infection. These layers ensure that even the most sophisticated ransomware operation — one that compromises domain admin, disables security tools, and deletes online backups — cannot touch your immutable recovery copies.
Do you back up Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace?
Yes, and you should be concerned if nobody is backing up yours today. Microsoft and Google do not back up your data in a way that protects against accidental deletion, malicious deletion, or retention policy gaps. We provide independent third-party backup for Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Gmail, Google Drive, and Shared Drives. Multiple daily backups with point-in-time restore, granular recovery of individual items or complete accounts, legal hold support, and compliance-grade retention independent of the vendor's native recycle bin. This is one of the most critical — and most overlooked — backup requirements for modern organizations.
How fast can you recover our systems after a disaster?
Recovery time depends on the disaster scope and your backup architecture tier. For organizations with VM replication, critical systems can be online in minutes via automated failover. For bare-metal recovery from local backup appliances, expect one to four hours for a typical server. For full environment recovery from offsite or cloud backup, expect four to twenty-four hours depending on data volume and network speed. We define specific RTO targets during the planning phase and engineer the architecture to meet them. Every RTO commitment is validated through testing. We do not promise recovery times we cannot demonstrate.
How do you test disaster recovery?
Annual full DR tests simulate a complete disaster scenario. We restore critical servers from backup, verify operating system and application functionality, validate database integrity, confirm network connectivity, and have your team test business workflows on the recovered systems. Everything is documented: restore times, data integrity checks, issues encountered, and remediation actions. Between annual tests, monthly backup verification confirms backup integrity, and quarterly restore spot-checks recover random files and databases to prove point-in-time recovery works. The testing documentation satisfies compliance audit requirements for HIPAA, SOC 2, CMMC, and PCI DSS.
What compliance frameworks does your backup service support?
We design backup and DR programs that satisfy HIPAA (contingency planning, data backup, disaster recovery, and emergency mode operation requirements), SOC 2 (availability trust service criterion), CMMC and DFARS (recovery practices for CUI), PCI DSS (regular testing of security systems and processes, including backup procedures), and state-specific data breach notification requirements that assume you can actually restore compromised data. Retention policies are configured to match your specific regulatory requirements, and all backup controls are documented with the evidence packages assessors need.
What does backup and disaster recovery cost?
Pricing is based on the volume of data protected, the number of systems backed up, the backup tiers required (local, offsite, immutable), RTO/RPO targets, and whether you need VM replication for rapid failover. Most mid-market organizations invest between $500 and $5,000 per month for comprehensive backup and DR covering all servers, workstations, cloud applications, and disaster recovery planning and testing. Compare that to the cost of a single ransomware incident — which averages $1.85 million for mid-market firms — and backup is the most cost-effective investment in your technology stack. We provide detailed pricing after the backup assessment.
Can you recover data from a ransomware attack?
Yes — that is the primary reason immutable backups exist. When ransomware encrypts your production environment, we recover from immutable backup copies that the attackers could not touch. The recovery process uses isolated infrastructure to prevent re-infection: we build a clean network segment, restore servers from immutable backups, validate data integrity, patch the vulnerabilities the attackers exploited, and bring systems back online only after confirming the environment is clean. For clients with our backup program in place before an attack, recovery typically takes hours to a day depending on environment size. For organizations without adequate backups, we provide forensic investigation and negotiate with threat actors as a last resort — but the goal of our backup program is to ensure you never need to pay a ransom.
Is Your Business Protected If Disaster Strikes Tomorrow?
Most organizations do not know the answer until it is too late. Get a free backup assessment that reveals exactly where your recovery gaps are — before ransomware, hardware failure, or natural disaster exposes them for you. 30+ years of data protection expertise. Zero data losses among clients following our backup program.
BBB Accredited Since 2003 • Founded 2002 • 2,500+ Clients Served • Zero Breaches Among Clients Following Our Security Program