Backups built to survive the ransomware that will come looking for them.

No. Retention policies exist, typically running thirty to a hundred and eighty days for deleted mail and SharePoint content, and they are not backups. They expire, nothing makes them immutable, and neither recovers you from an administrator acting maliciously or from an item that corrupted quietly. The shared responsibility documentation is explicit that backup is your job rather than Microsoft. We include backup of that data as standard on the upper two tiers.

Three copies in total, meaning production plus two backups, held on two different kinds of media, with one of them somewhere other than your building. It is the standard because each layer defends against a different failure: somebody deleting something, hardware dying, and losing the site entirely. Most clients now add a fourth element on top, which is immutability, specifically for ransomware.

Retention varies by tier, running thirty days at the entry level, ninety in the middle, and whatever you need at the top. Regulated sectors nearly always require considerably longer, sometimes seven years and occasionally twenty five. Retention gets tiered accordingly, with fast storage for the first month or three and cheaper archival storage beyond that. What it costs scales with volume and with how long you keep things, and that gets modeled openly rather than buried.

Backups are written into storage where the storage platform itself refuses any modification or deletion until the retention period has run. An administrator holding every right available cannot delete one before it expires. That is precisely why somebody who has taken full control of your domain still cannot reach the last good copy of your data.

Default: Microsoft Azure (East US or West US region) or AWS (us-east-1, us-west-2) for clients requiring US data residency. Alternative: our managed off-site storage in a separate US datacenter. Custom destinations available for clients with specific compliance requirements (HIPAA-eligible regions, GovCloud, FedRAMP-aligned tenancies, etc.).

Yes. We assess current state, identify gaps (typically: missing immutability, untested restores, no off-site copy, M365 not backed up), and deliver a remediation plan. Most takeovers complete in 2-4 weeks with minimal disruption to your existing schedule.

Failure escalates to the on-call engineer immediately, not to a daily report. They investigate, re-run, or fix the root cause. Persistent failures (3+ consecutive on the same system) trigger an engineering review with you. Backup health is reviewed in your monthly summary; misses are documented, not buried.

Backup is the data layer of DR. A complete DR program adds: written RPO/RTO targets, recovery runbooks, replication architecture, annual live failover, and incident response procedures. Backup alone gets you the data; DR gets the business back online inside the agreed window. Most regulated clients buy both.