🛡 Veeam-Powered Backup & Disaster Recovery

IT Disaster Recovery Services
for UK Businesses

When the worst happens, Vertex9 gets you back online — fast. Veeam-powered backup, documented DR plans, quarterly failover testing and guaranteed RTO/RPO targets, all managed for you.

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Most UK Businesses Are One Incident Away From Serious Trouble

UK businesses lose an average of £4,500 per hour during IT downtime — and that figure rises sharply for businesses in financial services, legal, healthcare, and e-commerce. When you factor in lost productivity, reputational damage, missed orders, and potential regulatory penalties, even a few hours of downtime can be financially devastating for an SME.

Yet research consistently shows that 60% of UK SMEs have no tested disaster recovery plan. They may have a backup running somewhere, but they have no documented process for recovering their systems, no defined recovery targets, and no confidence that their backup would actually restore correctly when they need it most.

Ransomware attacks, hardware failures, accidental deletion, office fires, flooding, and corrupted software updates are all real threats that Vertex9 clients have faced. In every case, those with a properly managed disaster recovery solution were operational again within hours. Those without one faced days or weeks of disruption — and in some cases, permanent data loss.

Read our analysis of the true cost of IT downtime for UK businesses to understand what is at stake, and talk to Vertex9 today about a DR solution sized for your business.

£4,500

average cost per hour of IT downtime for UK businesses

60%

of UK SMEs have no tested disaster recovery plan in place

15 min

Recovery Point Objective achievable for critical systems with near-continuous Veeam replication

Our Disaster Recovery Services

A complete, layered approach to business continuity — from daily cloud backup through to fully documented DR plans and tested failover procedures.

Cloud Backup

Vertex9 implements Veeam-powered cloud backup for your servers, virtual machines, Microsoft 365 data, and on-premise infrastructure. All backup data is encrypted with AES-256 and stored in UK data centres. Backup schedules are configured to meet your RPO requirements, from daily to near-continuous incremental replication. Daily backup success monitoring with automated alerting is included.

Encrypted, UK-based cloud backup ›

Server Backup & Replication

For physical and virtual servers, Vertex9 deploys Veeam Backup & Replication to create complete, application-consistent backups and real-time VM replicas to a secondary environment. This means that if your primary server fails, a replica can be powered on within minutes. We support VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and physical Windows/Linux server environments.

Near-instant server failover ›

Disaster Recovery Planning

A comprehensive Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a written document — not a mental note. Vertex9 produces full DRP documentation aligned with ISO 22301 principles, covering your critical systems inventory, recovery priorities, defined RTO and RPO targets, step-by-step recovery procedures, communication protocols, and staff roles and responsibilities. The DRP is reviewed and updated annually or following significant infrastructure changes.

ISO 22301-aligned documentation ›

DR Testing

An untested DR plan is no better than having no plan at all. Vertex9 conducts quarterly scheduled failover tests for all managed DR clients, simulating real disaster scenarios in an isolated test environment without impacting your live systems. Each test produces a written report confirming which systems were tested, the results achieved against your RTO/RPO targets, and recommendations for improvement where required.

Quarterly tested and documented ›

Business Continuity Planning

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) goes beyond IT. While a DRP covers the restoration of technical systems, a BCP considers how your entire business continues to operate during a disruption — including remote working arrangements, manual fallback procedures, supplier communications, customer communications, and regulatory notification requirements. Vertex9 helps integrate IT disaster recovery into your broader organisational resilience strategy.

Whole-business resilience planning ›

Rapid Recovery & Failover

When disaster strikes, speed is everything. Vertex9 provides a managed rapid recovery service, activating your DR environment and restoring business operations as quickly as your pre-agreed RTO allows. Our team is available 24/7 to respond to declared disasters, executing your recovery runbook while keeping your senior team updated throughout the process. We do not simply hand you a checklist — we manage the recovery for you.

24/7 managed recovery response ›

Understanding RTO and RPO

Two acronyms sit at the heart of every disaster recovery conversation: RTO and RPO. Understanding them is essential to designing a DR solution that actually meets your business needs.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of time your business can tolerate being without a particular system or service before the impact becomes unacceptable. For a manufacturing business, their production management system might have an RTO of two hours — any longer and production halts. For an e-commerce business, their website may have an RTO of 30 minutes.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data loss your business can tolerate, measured in time. If your last backup runs at midnight and a failure occurs at 5pm the following day, you could lose 17 hours of data. If your RPO is four hours, you need much more frequent backups or continuous replication.

Vertex9 works with you to define realistic RTO and RPO targets for each of your critical systems, then designs a backup and replication strategy that delivers those targets — and tests it quarterly to prove that it does.

  • Formal RTO and RPO targets documented in your DR plan
  • Near-continuous Veeam replication achieves RPO as low as 15 minutes
  • Cloud failover environments for sub-2-hour RTO on critical workloads
  • Different RTO/RPO tiers available for different systems based on business criticality
  • Quarterly DR tests verify that actual recovery times meet agreed targets
Recovery Time Objective
RTO — How Long to Get Back Online
The maximum acceptable time from the moment of a failure to the moment the affected system or service is restored and operational. Vertex9 designs your DR solution to meet your agreed RTO, verified through quarterly testing.
Recovery Point Objective
RPO — How Much Data You Can Afford to Lose
The maximum amount of data loss, measured in time, that your business can tolerate. Vertex9 uses Veeam journal-based replication to achieve RPOs as low as 15 minutes for mission-critical systems — meaning you would lose at most 15 minutes of work in a worst-case disaster.
Vertex9 Approach
Tiered Recovery Targets
Not all systems are equally critical. Vertex9 helps you categorise your workloads by business importance, applying appropriate RTO and RPO targets to each tier — ensuring budget is focused where recovery speed matters most.
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40% of businesses never reopen Following a major data loss event, four in ten businesses close permanently within 12 months — often because they cannot recover their client records, financial data, or operational systems in time to remain viable.
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£4,500 average hourly downtime cost UK businesses face direct and indirect costs of approximately £4,500 for every hour of IT downtime — rising to tens of thousands for larger organisations or regulated industries. A full day of downtime can cost more than an entire year of managed DR.
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Ransomware recovery costs rising sharply Average ransomware recovery costs for UK SMEs exceeded £100,000 in 2024 when factoring in downtime, investigation, remediation, and reputational damage. Immutable, air-gapped backups are the most effective defence against ransomware data destruction.
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Regulatory fines for data loss GDPR requires businesses to protect personal data from unauthorised loss or destruction. A data breach resulting from poor backup practices can result in ICO fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover, in addition to mandatory breach notification obligations.

The Cost of Not Having Disaster Recovery

Businesses often view disaster recovery as an optional extra — something to consider once they have grown a bit more, or once budget allows. This is one of the most costly misconceptions in IT management. The question is not whether a disaster will occur, but when.

Ransomware attacks have increased year-on-year for the past decade. Hardware failures occur without warning. Human error — accidentally deleting a critical database or misconfiguring a server — is consistently one of the leading causes of data loss in UK businesses. And physical disasters — office floods, burst pipes, and fire damage — continue to affect UK businesses every year.

For each of these scenarios, a properly managed backup and disaster recovery solution is the difference between a stressful few hours and a business-ending event. Vertex9 has helped businesses recover from all of these scenarios — and in every case, those with a tested DR plan in place recovered quickly. Those without one faced a much more difficult road.

Find out more in our blog: The True Cost of Downtime for UK Businesses.

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Veeam-Powered Backup & Recovery

As a Veeam partner, Vertex9 delivers enterprise-grade backup and replication technology to UK businesses of all sizes, with ransomware protection built in.

Why Vertex9 Chooses Veeam

Veeam is the global leader in backup, recovery, and data management, trusted by over 450,000 customers worldwide. Vertex9 has selected Veeam as our primary backup platform because it delivers the combination of capabilities that UK SMEs need most: reliability, speed, and ransomware resilience.

Veeam's immutable backup technology is particularly important in the current threat landscape. Immutable backups cannot be encrypted, deleted, or modified by ransomware — even if an attacker has domain administrator credentials. Combined with air-gapped off-site copies and the 3-2-1 backup rule, Veeam gives your business genuine protection against the most sophisticated ransomware attacks.

Veeam also integrates directly with cloud platforms including Microsoft Azure and AWS, enabling cost-effective cloud-based DR environments without the need for expensive dedicated secondary hardware.

The 3-2-1 Backup Rule — Explained

3
Three copies of your data Your live data counts as one. You need at least two additional backup copies.
2
Two different storage media types E.g., a local NAS device and cloud object storage — not two copies on the same system.
1
One copy stored off-site At least one backup must be in a geographically separate location — such as a UK cloud data centre.
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Immutable Backups Write-once storage that ransomware cannot encrypt or delete — even with admin credentials
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Air-Gapped Copies Off-site backup copies physically or logically isolated from your primary network
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Near-Continuous Replication Journal-based replication to achieve RPO as low as 15 minutes for critical VMs
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Cloud DR Integration Native integration with Azure, AWS, and UK cloud data centres for cost-effective DR environments
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Microsoft 365 Backup Full backup of Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams — Microsoft does not back these up for you
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AES-256 Encryption All backup data encrypted in transit and at rest with AES-256 — stored in UK data centres
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Daily Backup Monitoring Automated verification of backup success with alerting for any failed or missed jobs
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Granular Restore Restore individual files, folders, emails, or entire VMs — from any recovery point in your retention window

Disaster Recovery FAQs

Answers to the questions UK businesses most commonly ask about backup and disaster recovery.

At an absolute minimum, daily backups should be in place for all business-critical data. However, Vertex9 recommends near-continuous replication for critical systems using Veeam's journal-based backup technology. This can reduce your Recovery Point Objective to as little as 15 minutes, meaning that in a worst-case disaster scenario, you would lose at most 15 minutes of data rather than a full working day. For less critical systems and file servers, daily or twice-daily backups may be sufficient and more cost-effective. The right frequency depends on how much data loss your business can genuinely afford — which is something we assess during your free DR review.
Vertex9 stores backup data in UK-based data centres with AES-256 encryption applied both in transit and at rest. Storage locations are configurable to specific UK regions — typically London and Manchester — to meet GDPR data residency requirements. For clients requiring air-gapped protection against ransomware, we can also implement immutable cloud storage targets where backup data cannot be modified or deleted for a defined retention period, regardless of credential compromise.
Recovery time depends on the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) agreed in your disaster recovery plan and the nature of the recovery scenario. For cloud failover scenarios using Veeam replication to a pre-provisioned cloud DR environment, RTO of two to four hours is achievable for most SME workloads. Physical server recovery from backup takes longer and depends on hardware availability. File-level and email restores can typically be completed within minutes. We design your DR solution around your specific RTO requirements and verify those targets quarterly through failover testing.
Backup is the process of copying data to a secondary location so it can be restored if the original is lost or corrupted. It is a single technical process. Disaster recovery is a much broader strategy that covers the complete restoration of IT infrastructure and business operations following a major incident — including servers, applications, networking, user access, communication systems, and staff procedures. Backup is one component of disaster recovery, but without a documented DR plan, tested recovery procedures, and defined RTO/RPO targets, a backup alone will not get your business back online quickly. Vertex9 provides both.
Yes. Vertex9 produces comprehensive, written Disaster Recovery Plans aligned with ISO 22301 business continuity management principles. The DRP documents your critical systems inventory, defines recovery priorities and tiers, specifies RTO and RPO targets for each workload, provides step-by-step recovery runbooks, and defines communication protocols and staff responsibilities during a disaster. The plan is reviewed annually and updated following any significant change to your infrastructure. Clients who have needed to invoke their DRP have consistently reported that having a clear, tested runbook made a stressful situation manageable.
Vertex9 conducts quarterly scheduled failover tests for all clients on a managed DR contract. During each test, we simulate a real disaster scenario in an isolated test environment — completely separate from your live systems — by failing over to your DR environment and verifying that critical systems start correctly, applications function, data integrity is confirmed, and actual recovery times are measured against your agreed RTO targets. After each test, you receive a written report detailing what was tested, the results achieved, whether RTO/RPO targets were met, and any recommendations for improvement. Without regular testing, you cannot know whether your DR solution will work when it matters most.

Don't Wait for a Disaster to Find Out You're Unprepared

Book a free disaster recovery review with a Vertex9 engineer. We will assess your current backup posture, identify gaps, and recommend a tailored BDR solution with defined RTO and RPO targets — at no obligation.

Request a Free DR Review Call 020 3633 9124

Free assessment. No pressure. Expert DR advice from Vertex9.