Disaster Recovery · Houston

Backup and Disaster Recovery in Houston, TX

Houston's recovery plans get tested by real events: Allison in 2001, Harvey in 2017, the 2021 freeze, and two 2024 storms that each left about a million customers or more without power. NetSys builds backup and disaster recovery that keeps copies of your data outside the region, restores on a schedule you have seen work, and runs remotely from Brooklyn.

All IT services in Houston, TX

The short answer

NetSys provides backup and disaster recovery to Houston businesses: Datto SIRIS or Veeam backups of servers and workstations, separate Microsoft 365 backup, immutable copies replicated to data centers outside the Gulf Coast, written recovery time and recovery point targets, scheduled test restores and a runbook for hurricanes, freezes and ransomware. Everything is managed remotely and through the cloud; NetSys does not send engineers to Houston, so recovery is designed to work even when nobody can reach the building. Pricing follows the data protected and the recovery targets, quoted after an assessment.

Service information by The NetSys Group. Our editorial standards.

How backup and disaster recovery is delivered in Houston

Backups run on equipment and cloud services our engineers manage from Brooklyn. Where servers stay on premises, a Datto SIRIS appliance or a Veeam repository takes frequent snapshots locally and replicates them each night to a data center outside the Gulf Coast, where copies are immutable for a set retention period. Microsoft 365 mail, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams are backed up separately, because Microsoft's own retention is not a backup. NinjaOne reports every job, and a failed backup opens a ticket automatically. No NetSys engineer is based in Houston, so the plan never depends on one arriving: a Datto appliance can boot a failed server as a virtual machine on the spot, the cloud copy can run it in the data center, and replacement hardware ships with the restore already planned. Monitoring runs 24/7 from Brooklyn, and so does emergency service. Our staffed help-desk hours are 4 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time (3 a.m. to 10 p.m. Central), seven days a week. The proposal states severe-incident escalation, authorized remediation and any other after-hours work.

Water, wind and power: what Houston has already been through

In June 2001, Tropical Storm Allison sent floodwater through the tunnels that connect Texas Medical Center buildings, submerging basements that held generators, electrical switchgear and research data. Harvey brought catastrophic flooding across the region in August 2017, and Harris County has since been named in federal declarations for Tropical Storm Imelda in 2019, the February 2021 winter storms, the May 2024 derecho and Hurricane Beryl in July 2024, when 2.26 million CenterPoint customers lost power and the utility warned that hundreds of thousands could wait a week or more. The lessons for IT are consistent. Equipment below grade floods, generators fail when their switchgear is wet, and a building can be unreachable for days. A recovery plan for Houston assumes all three.

Recovery targets you can test

Every system gets two numbers in writing. The recovery point objective is how much data you can afford to lose, perhaps an hour for the accounting database and a day for an archive share. The recovery time objective is how long the business can wait, perhaps four hours for email and the ERP, two days for a reporting server. Those numbers decide the design: snapshot frequency, whether a Datto appliance runs virtual servers locally, whether a cloud failover is prepared in advance and which systems come back first. Then we prove them. On a schedule agreed in the plan, an engineer restores a sample of servers, files and mailboxes, times the work and sends you a report showing what was restored, how long it took and anything that failed, so the numbers on paper match what happens.

A hurricane-season runbook, June through November

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, and a Houston runbook works through it in stages. Before the season we confirm the last good backup of every system, check that replication to the out-of-state copy is current, update the contact tree and verify that staff laptops can work from home. When a storm is forecast, the engineer confirms a fresh backup, servers are shut down cleanly if your plan says so, equipment on low shelves is raised, and the firewall's cellular failover is tested. During and after the storm, monitoring shows what is up, and recovery follows the agreed order: identity and email first, then files, then the line-of-business systems. If the office stays closed, critical servers run from the cloud copy until you return.

Ransomware is a disaster too

A hurricane announces itself days ahead; ransomware usually does not. Attackers now go after backups first, deleting or encrypting them before they lock the servers, so the design keeps copies out of their reach. Cloud copies are immutable for their retention period, the backup console has its own administrator accounts with multifactor sign-in, and those credentials never sit on the domain an attacker might take over. Over the last three years our engineers have worked more than 30 ransomware cases and recovered all of them; where a disaster recovery plan already existed, the client was operating again inside 24 hours. Recovery starts with a clean environment, restores from a point before the infection began, and checks every restored system with ThreatDown before users reconnect.

What is included

Disaster Recovery in Houston: what NetSys delivers

Backups that survive an attack

Immutable Datto SIRIS or Veeam backups of servers and cloud workloads, with an off-site copy no single building or account can delete
Microsoft 365 mailboxes, OneDrive and SharePoint backed up outside Microsoft's own retention

Recovery objectives and testing

Recovery time and recovery point objectives agreed per system with the people who depend on it
Restore tests timed on a schedule and written up for partners, examiners and insurers

Ransomware and outage recovery

Isolation of affected devices and accounts before anything is restored
Recovery from immutable copies in the order the business needs

Published case study

Large international food importer: the whole platform rebuilt in Azure

An extreme weather event knocked out power and connectivity to a food importer's building and cut a 120-person, three-warehouse business off from suppliers and clients worldwide for days. NetSys assessed every workload with recovery objectives per system, rebuilt the platform in Azure with immutable backups and a tested recovery runbook, and moved the business through a weekend cut-over after ten weeks of work.

Read the full case study (120+ employees · 3 warehouses)

From our client work

Disaster recovery work for other clients

Logistics and warehousing
Refrigerated food storage operator
Backup and disaster recovery planning for 4 servers, recovery testing, and redundant internet connections across two facilities.
Business Continuity Planning IT for Logistics and Transportation

Client names are withheld. These examples were chosen for the work involved, not for where the client is, so none is presented as a Houston client.

What backup and disaster recovery costs in Houston

Backup and disaster recovery is priced per protected server and per Microsoft 365 user, with the appliance either included on the agreement or purchased outright. What moves the number: the volume of data, the recovery time you need, whether recovery has to run in the cloud while the office is unavailable, and how often restores are tested and reported. We quote from an inventory of what has to come back and in what order, and terms run month to month.

How the monthly fee is built

Who this fits, and who it does not

Best fit: any business whose work stops when a server or the Microsoft 365 tenant is unavailable, and any business a regulator, insurer or customer has asked about recovery time.

Disaster Recovery in Houston: FAQs

How does backup and disaster recovery work for Houston organizations?

Our engineers in Brooklyn manage the backup appliances, cloud replication and Microsoft 365 backup remotely, watch every job and work each failure until it is resolved. Recovery is also remote: servers can run as virtual machines on a local Datto appliance or in the cloud, and files and mailboxes are restored from the console. NetSys does not send engineers to Houston, so nothing in the plan waits on travel. Monitoring and emergency response run 24/7, and the help desk is staffed from 3 a.m. to 10 p.m. Central.

How much does backup and disaster recovery cost in Houston, TX?

It is quoted after an assessment, and the drivers are technical: how much data is protected, how many servers and workstations, how long copies are retained, and how short your recovery targets are. A plan that can run critical servers in the cloud within hours costs more than one that restores files within a day. Microsoft 365 backup is priced per user. Backup and disaster recovery can be part of a managed IT agreement or a standalone service, and hardware such as a Datto appliance is quoted separately.

How do we recover a Houston business after ransomware or an outage?

Call the help desk or your dedicated engineer. For ransomware, the engineer isolates infected devices, disables compromised accounts and confirms which backups predate the infection, then restores in the order your plan sets: identity, email, files and line-of-business systems, each checked before users return. For a flood, power loss or building closure, critical servers start from the Datto appliance or the cloud copy and staff work from home. Clients with a plan in place have been back within 24 hours.

Can you support our Houston office remotely, and what does onboarding look like?

Yes. Onboarding starts with an inventory of every server, workstation, database and Microsoft 365 workload, followed by a meeting to set recovery point and recovery time targets for each. The engineer then deploys the backup agents or appliance, configures out-of-state replication and Microsoft 365 backup, and runs a first full test restore within the first month. You receive the written runbook, the contact tree and the first restore report. Any hardware ships configured for your staff or contractor to connect.

What does HIPAA require for backup and disaster recovery?

Under the HIPAA Security Rule's contingency plan standard, 45 CFR 164.308(a)(7), a practice must have three written plans for electronic protected health information: one for data backup, one for disaster recovery and one for operating in emergency mode. The standard treats testing and revision procedures and an applications and data criticality analysis as addressable specifications. For a practice near the Medical Center, our runbook, restore reports and criticality list are the evidence an auditor asks for. This is general information, not legal advice.

Backups are only real once restored

Know your recovery time before you need it.

Discuss the systems you need to recover, existing backups and acceptable downtime. We can then scope a backup review, restore test or recovery plan around those requirements.

Explore Disaster Recovery Scope 845-203-3914