Backup & Disaster Recovery in New York City
New York City businesses lose their systems in ordinary ways: a ransomware note on a Monday morning, a flooded basement server room, a building that cannot be entered, a deleted mailbox nobody noticed for a month. NetSys provides backup and disaster recovery across the five boroughs from our Brooklyn office: immutable backups, restores we test on a schedule, recovery objectives set per system, ransomware recovery, business continuity planning and independent Microsoft 365 backup, all on month-to-month terms.
The short answer
NetSys delivers backup and disaster recovery to businesses in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. The service includes immutable, offline backup copies that ransomware cannot alter, restores tested on a schedule with the results written down, recovery time and recovery point objectives agreed per system so the order of recovery is decided before an outage, ransomware recovery with isolation and root-cause work, business continuity planning for the people and processes, and independent cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft 365. Over the past three years NetSys has handled more than thirty ransomware incidents, every one fully recovered, and clients with a disaster recovery plan in place were back within 24 hours. Our only office is at 1 Prospect Park SW in Brooklyn, so on-site recovery work anywhere in the city is a routine trip. Agreements run month to month.
What disaster recovery in New York City has to plan for
The city's failure modes are specific. Server rooms in basements and ground floors have flooded in coastal storms, from Lower Manhattan to Red Hook. Buildings lose power or become inaccessible, and a firm whose only copy of its documents lives on a server behind a locked lobby is out of business until the doors open. Ransomware crews target law firms, accounting practices, medical groups and importers because a firm that bills by the hour or ships by the day will consider paying. Regulators have written recovery into the rules: NYDFS Part 500 requires licensed financial businesses to maintain business continuity and disaster recovery plans, HIPAA requires a contingency plan with tested backups, and insurers ask for offline copies and restore tests before they renew. Most city businesses also assume Microsoft keeps a backup of their tenant. It does not, past a retention window.
How NetSys delivers backup and disaster recovery in NYC
Design comes first: an engineer inventories every system, from the file server in a Midtown closet to the practice-management database in a Queens clinic, and agrees a recovery time and recovery point objective for each with the people who depend on it. Then we build the copies: immutable backups that cannot be altered from inside the network, an offline copy, cloud replicas for the workloads that need to fail over in minutes rather than hours, and cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft 365. Restores are tested on a schedule and timed, so the objectives are proven rather than assumed. The continuity plan covers where people work and how they reach clients when the office is unavailable. Because the office is in Brooklyn, an engineer can be on-site in any borough to rebuild hardware or stand up a temporary environment. Terms are month to month.
Who this fits in New York City
Professional firms that cannot practice without their document management system, healthcare groups whose contingency plan is a HIPAA requirement, importers and distributors running an ERP that decides what ships, financial businesses under NYDFS, nonprofits with donor databases, and any company whose last restore test never happened. Businesses with their own IT person fit as a co-managed arrangement, where we own the backup platform, the testing and the recovery runbook. Businesses that survived one ransomware event and want the next one to be an inconvenience rather than a crisis are the strongest fit. If the office were unreachable tomorrow morning, and you cannot say how long until staff could work, that is the question the plan answers.
Backup & Disaster Recovery in New York City: what NetSys delivers
Backups
- Immutable backups for servers, workstations and cloud workloads that cannot be altered or deleted from inside the network
- An offline copy the attacker cannot reach, plus off-site copies away from the building
- Independent cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft 365 mail, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams
- Backup monitoring every day, with failures investigated rather than logged
Recovery objectives and testing
- Recovery time and recovery point objectives agreed per system with the people who use it
- Scheduled restore tests, timed and documented, so every objective is proven
- Cloud failover for the systems that must be back in minutes
- A recovery runbook that says what comes back first, who does it, and how it is verified
- Plan reviews when systems change, not once a year by habit
Ransomware recovery
- Immediate isolation of affected devices so encryption stops spreading
- Restoration from immutable copies in business-priority order
- Root-cause work to close the entry point before anything comes back online
- An incident timeline for leadership, counsel and your insurer
Business continuity
- A plan for where staff work when the building is flooded, dark or locked
- Communication paths that survive the loss of the office phone system and email
- Manual procedures for the work that cannot wait for systems
- Coordination with landlords, carriers and vendors during a regional event
A Manhattan architecture firm with a server in the basement
A composite example of work we do in New York City, written so you can picture the first 90 days. It is not a specific client. Our real, anonymized engagements are in case studies.
A firm of several dozen people in a building near the water, with project files on a server in a basement room the landlord provides and backups to an external drive kept in the same room. Microsoft 365 holds the email and the contracts. A coastal storm warning has the partners asking what happens if the basement floods, and a principal recently discovered that a departed employee's mailbox was deleted with years of client correspondence in it.
- Inventory of every system with a recovery time and recovery point objective agreed for each: project files first, then email and contracts, then the rest
- Immutable, off-site backups of the server with an offline copy, replacing the external drive in the flood-prone room
- Cloud replica of the project file server so the firm can work from home on the current files if the building is closed
- Independent Microsoft 365 backup covering mail, OneDrive and SharePoint, with retention that outlives Microsoft's deletion window and departed employees' accounts
- A timed restore test of the project files and a mailbox, a written runbook, and a continuity plan for working through a building closure
The next storm warning is a checklist rather than a scramble. Project files can be reached from anywhere if the basement floods, a deleted mailbox can be brought back years later, and the partners know how long recovery takes because it has been timed. The agreement runs month to month.
Related pages
Read the full Disaster Recovery service page. See everything NetSys delivers in New York City.
Also in New York City: Cybersecurity · Network Security & Monitoring
Backup & Disaster Recovery elsewhere: Brooklyn, NY · Nassau County, NY · Suffolk County, NY · Westchester County, NY · Stamford, CT
Related services: Cyber Security · Cloud Services · Managed IT Services · Microsoft 365 Management & Backup
Backup & Disaster Recovery in New York City: FAQs
Who provides backup and disaster recovery services in New York City?
The NetSys Group provides backup and disaster recovery to businesses across all five boroughs from its office in Brooklyn. The service includes immutable backups with an offline copy, restores tested on a schedule, recovery objectives set per system, ransomware recovery, business continuity planning and independent Microsoft 365 backup. Engineers work on-site anywhere in New York City for hardware rebuilds and recovery, and every agreement runs month to month. NetSys has been doing this work since 1998.
What is the difference between backup and disaster recovery?
A backup is a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the tested plan and infrastructure that gets the business working again: which systems come back first, where they run if the building is unavailable, who does each step, and how long it takes. A firm can have years of backups and still be down for a week because nobody ever restored a server or decided what order things return in. NetSys builds both and proves the recovery with timed tests.
How fast can a New York business recover from ransomware?
It depends on whether the plan existed before the attack. Over the last three years NetSys has handled more than thirty ransomware incidents, and every one was fully recovered. The clients who had a disaster recovery plan in place were back within 24 hours; the ones who did not took longer, because backups had to be found and verified under pressure. The plan, the immutable copies and the tested restore are what turn the event into a bad day instead of a bad month.
Does Microsoft 365 back up our email and files?
Microsoft protects its infrastructure and keeps deleted items for a retention window, then they are gone. It does not protect you from your own deletions, a departed employee's account being removed, a ransomware infection syncing encrypted files up from a laptop, or a malicious insider. Independent cloud-to-cloud backup keeps copies of mail, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams under your control with retention you set. NetSys includes it in disaster recovery for every Microsoft 365 client.
Do NYDFS or HIPAA require a disaster recovery plan?
Yes. NYDFS Part 500 requires covered financial businesses to maintain written business continuity and disaster recovery plans, test them, and keep backups sufficient to restore operations. HIPAA's Security Rule requires a contingency plan with a data backup plan, a disaster recovery plan and an emergency mode operation plan, along with testing. NetSys builds the technical pieces and documents the plan in a form that meets those requirements and answers an insurer's questions.
What does a New York office do when the building floods or cannot be entered?
Work from somewhere else on current data, which only happens if the plan was built for it. Cloud replicas of the systems that matter, independent Microsoft 365 backup, and remote access that staff have used before an emergency let a firm keep working from home or a temporary space. The continuity plan says who calls whom, how clients are reached without the office phones, and which tasks proceed manually. We rehearse it, because a plan nobody has read is a document.
Know your recovery time before you need it.
We look at what is backed up, where it lives, when it was last restored and how long a full recovery would take, then set targets per system.