What a Buckhead firm stands to lose
For a law office it's matter files and years of correspondence. For an advisory firm it's client records, meeting notes and the email archive an examiner may ask for. For a real estate or insurance company it's signed contracts, policy files and transaction history. Losing any of it costs time and money, and it can also mean notice to clients, regulators or a court.
In our first look at a firm, backup is usually where the surprises are. The job was configured long ago, its failure notices land in a former employee's inbox, and it protects a file server while ignoring Microsoft 365, laptops and the cloud tools that now hold most of the work.
What actually goes wrong
- Ransomware: the most common reason for a full restore. Intruders hunt for backup consoles early and wipe them before they encrypt anything else.
- Account compromise: an intruder in a mailbox can delete messages or entire folders to hide their tracks.
- Simple mistakes: an overwritten spreadsheet, a deleted client folder or a sync that removed the original.
- Building events: in a tower, a sprinkler discharge on the floor above, planned electrical work or a closure ordered by management can shut your suite even when your own equipment is fine.
- Weather: Fulton County has been part of several federal disaster or emergency declarations since 2000, including the 2014 ice storm, Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane Helene in 2024. Downed trees across Buckhead's wooded residential streets can also cut power and internet to home offices for hours or longer.
How we set it up
- Full coverage: file and application servers, important desktops, Exchange Online mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, and the databases under your practice or portfolio software.
- Copies kept apart: one on site for quick recovery of a single file, and another in a separate cloud location in case the tower is closed.
- Out of an intruder's reach: immutable or offline copies, behind their own credentials, that an attacker inside your network can't erase or lock.
- Reviewed daily: someone on our team reads the results each business day, and a failed job gets fixed, not filed.
- Drilled: on a set calendar we bring back files and whole systems, time the process and write down the result, so your recovery time is a measured number.
A plan for getting people working
Data coming back is only part of recovery. People also need somewhere to work. Your written recovery plan covers who makes decisions, where staff work if the tower is closed, how phones are forwarded, the order systems return in and what you tell clients. For most Buckhead firms the answer is managed laptops, Microsoft 365 and cloud phones that work from home just as they do in the suite. We confirm that holds before you need it.
Some firms have formal requirements here. Broker-dealers must keep a written business continuity plan under FINRA Rule 4370, and the amended Regulation S-P expects an incident response program that covers containment and customer notice. We build the technical parts of those plans and test them with you.
Standby systems for firms that can't wait
If a key server can't be down for more than a few hours, we can keep a standby copy in the cloud that can be started quickly. For many offices, protected offsite backups and a rehearsed restore do the job. We'll set out the cost and the risk of each option so you can choose.
Power in the suite
Buildings schedule electrical maintenance, and brief outages still happen. We size and monitor battery backups for your firewall, switches and any remaining servers, configure a graceful shutdown when an outage runs long, and swap batteries on a schedule rather than after one dies.
Questions about backup & disaster recovery
Doesn't Microsoft already back up our email and files?
Microsoft keeps the service available and keeps deleted items only for a short retention window. It won't bring back data deleted months ago, a departed employee's mailbox or files encrypted by ransomware. A separate backup covers those.
How do we know a restore will really work?
We test. File restores are checked regularly, full system recoveries at least once a year, and you get a short report showing what was restored and how long it took.
