Offsite Disaster Recovery for Tampa Bay Businesses

Local backups protect against hardware failure, but not against fire, flood, theft, or regional disasters that take out your entire office. Offsite disaster recovery keeps a copy of your data and systems in a geographically separate location.

Offsite DR options:

- Cloud backup — data replicated to a remote data center

- Cloud failover — virtual servers spin up in the cloud if your primary site is unavailable

- Secondary physical site — a separate office or data center with replicated systems

Key decisions:

- RPO: how much data loss is acceptable (hourly, daily, weekly backups)

- RTO: how quickly systems must be back online after a disaster

- Testing: quarterly or annual disaster recovery tests verify the plan actually works

Florida businesses should pay particular attention to hurricane season. An offsite copy outside the region protects against the same storm taking out both your primary data and your backup.