Disaster Recovery

When everything fails, your business shouldn’t.

Most organisations believe they have Disaster Recovery because they have a backup.

Some believe they have DRaaS because a provider told them their systems can “run in the cloud”.

Both assumptions are usually wrong. Backups protect data. Disaster Recovery protects the business.

At Deane Computer Solutions, Disaster Recovery is not a product, a licence, or a checkbox.

It is a designed, tested, owned capability that exists to answer one question:
When something goes seriously wrong, can your business keep operating?

The uncomfortable truth about DR

Real incidents don’t look like vendor diagrams. They involve partial failures, total failures, and failures that cascade:

  • A firewall dies, taking VPN and internet with it
  • A rack loses power, then storage corrupts
  • A building floods or burns
  • An ISP outage isolates an entire site
  • Ransomware hits identity before data
  • Cloud workloads do boot — but nothing can reach them

This is where most DR strategies collapse. “In the cloud” often just means there’s a copy.

It does not mean:

  • Users can connect
  • DNS resolves correctly
  • Authentication works
  • Routing exists
  • The recovery environment is itself protected

A powered-on server that no one can access is not recovery. It’s downtime with better marketing.

How we actually do Disaster Recovery

WE DON’T START WITH TECHNOLOGY. WE START WITH FAILURE.

We assume:

  • Hardware will die
  • Internet will be unavailable
  • Identity may be impacted
  • Multiple things will break at once
  • The incident won’t follow the plan

From there, we build a recovery capability that works in the real world.
Using enterprise platforms such as Hornetsecurity, combined with our own infrastructure and engineers, we design DR around how your business actually operates — not how a brochure says it should.

It’s not “can it boot?”
It’s “can people work?”

Before you ever need to fail over, we pre-engineer the hard parts that most providers ignore:

  • Standby VPN bridges between your sites and our DR environment
  • Pre-configured DNS failover and routing
  • Identity and authentication continuity
  • Firewall rules and access policies already in place
  • Application dependencies understood and sequenced
  • User access paths tested and rehearsed

So when failover happens, connectivity is not invented on the fly. It already exists.

Users route to us.
Sites connect automatically.
Services behave predictably.
No scrambling.
No late-night guesswork.
No “nearly there”.

Backup is easy. Recovery is not.

ANYONE CAN SELL BACKUP.

Real Disaster Recovery means:

  • Layered backups (local, cloud, immutable, off-site)
  • Replication of systems that are boot-ready, not just stored
  • Recovery environments that are themselves backed up
  • Clear RPO and RTO targets that are achievable, not aspirational

Our infrastructure becomes your infrastructure when yours is
unavailable —
temporarily or for as long as needed.

When something goes wrong, we take ownership

THIS IS WHERE THE DIFFERENCE REALLY SHOWS.

In a real incident, you don’t need advice. You don’t need links. You don’t need escalation paths. You need someone to take control. When disaster strikes, we:

  • Activate the recovery plan
  • Bring systems online in our environment
  • Establish secure connectivity for users and sites
  • Restore identity, routing and access
  • Provide loan or replacement hardware where required
  • Coordinate with insurers if the incident is physical
  • Keep your people working
  • Stay until normal service is restored

We don’t deflect responsibility.
We don’t hide behind vendors.
We own the outcome.

Tested, proven, and kept current

An untested DR plan is a fantasy. We run structured recovery tests to validate:

  • Failover and rollback
  • Connectivity and routing
  • Authentication and access
  • Application functionality
  • Performance under load
  • Backup and replication integrity

If something doesn’t work, we fix it. If something slows recovery,
we redesign it.
If something could fail tomorrow because your environment changed,
we address it
before it matters. Disaster Recovery is not static. Neither are we.

What this gives you

  • Downtime measured in minutes, not days
  • Confidence instead of anxiety
  • A recovery plan that works under pressure
  • Engineers who lead, not observe
  • A partner who stays accountable when it matters

Disaster Recovery isn’t about hoping nothing happens.
It’s about knowing exactly what happens when it does.

The simple truth

If the worst happens:

  • We don’t blame the cloud
  • We don’t blame the hardware
  • We don’t blame suppliers

Disaster Recovery isn’t about hoping nothing happens.
It’s about knowing exactly what happens when it does.

WE FIX IT.

If you want Disaster Recovery that actually works — when hardware fails, when internet drops, when sites go dark, when everything is chaos — then you want a partner that designs for failure and owns the recovery.
That’s what we do.