Disaster Recovery · St Louis

Backup and Disaster Recovery in St. Louis, MO

In four years St. Louis has seen its wettest day on record, an EF3 tornado through the north side and a hometown health system working without full electronic records for weeks. NetSys builds backup and disaster recovery for St. Louis organizations so a destroyed office or an encrypted server costs hours, not weeks, with every restore tested and on record.

All IT services in St. Louis, MO

The short answer

NetSys provides backup and disaster recovery to St. Louis organizations: immutable Datto SIRIS or Veeam backups of servers and computers, separate backup of Microsoft 365 mail, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, copies held outside the region, recovery time and recovery point targets set per system, scheduled restore tests with written results, and a continuity plan for losing the office. It is run remotely from Brooklyn; NetSys does not send engineers on site in St. Louis. Monitoring and emergency recovery run 24/7. Across more than 30 ransomware cases in three years, clients who already had a recovery plan were running again inside 24 hours.

Service information by The NetSys Group. Our editorial standards.

How backup and disaster recovery is delivered in St. Louis

Backup is a service that never needs a technician in the room, and NetSys does not send engineers on site in St. Louis. For servers, a Datto SIRIS appliance or Veeam repository ships to you configured, your staff or contractor connects it, and we complete the setup remotely; image backups then run on schedule and replicate to cloud storage outside Missouri. Microsoft 365 data is protected by a separate cloud-to-cloud backup, because retention inside Microsoft is not a backup. Laptops keep files in OneDrive, which that backup also covers. We watch every job through monitoring, fix failures the same day, and run restore tests on a calendar you can see, with each result logged in IT Glue. 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.

Recovery targets for each St. Louis system

Disaster recovery starts with two questions for each system: how long can the business run without it, and how much recent data can it afford to lose? Those answers, the recovery time objective and recovery point objective, drive the design. A medical practice's EHR connection and phones might need to return within hours with no more than an hour of lost data, while an archive share can wait days. We record the answers in a recovery register, match each system to a method, such as a local appliance restore, running the server virtually in the Datto cloud or failing over to Azure, and price the options so you can decide where faster recovery is worth the cost. The register is reviewed whenever systems change and at least once a year.

Tornadoes, floods and the 2025 north side storm

St. Louis offices face more than one kind of physical disaster. On May 16, 2025 an EF3 tornado with winds estimated at 136 to 165 mph crossed north St. Louis and into St. Louis County, killing five people in the city and damaging or destroying roughly 5,000 buildings; the mayor put the damage near $2 billion. On July 26, 2022 Lambert measured 8.64 inches of rain, breaking a daily record that had stood since August 1915, and St. Peters logged 12.86 inches. That flood and the winter floods of 2015 to 2016 both brought federal disaster declarations. A backup kept in the same building as the server is lost with the building, so our designs keep an off-site, immutable copy, document how to rebuild from it, and test that rebuild before a storm forces it.

What the Ascension outage teaches about continuity

The most instructive local incident for continuity planning is the May 2024 ransomware attack on St. Louis-based Ascension. Its hospitals worked without electronic records, paused some elective procedures and diverted ambulances, and most systems were not back until around mid-June. A smaller organization will not need weeks if it has prepared, but it needs the same thinking: which work can continue on paper or by phone, who holds offline copies of contacts and procedures, and in what order systems come back. Our continuity plans answer those questions in writing, name the people responsible, list the vendors to call and include a printed one-page runbook. A tabletop exercise walks your leadership through a ransomware scenario, so the first hour of a real incident is not the first time anyone has thought about it.

Recovery planning for regulated St. Louis organizations

Several rules ask directly for recovery capability. Under the HIPAA Security Rule, the contingency plan standard names three required pieces, a data backup plan, a disaster recovery plan and an emergency mode operation plan, and asks covered entities to address testing and revision as well. The FTC Safeguards Rule expects tax preparers, lenders and other covered financial firms to protect customer information, including its availability. Defense suppliers under DFARS 252.204-7012 must preserve images of affected systems for at least 90 days after reporting a cyber incident, which a sound backup design makes possible. Missouri's RSMo 407.1500 and, for Illinois residents, 815 ILCS 530 come into play when backup media or systems holding personal data are exposed, so backup copies are encrypted too. We produce the restore logs, test reports and plans that show an auditor or insurer the controls work. This is general information, not legal advice.

What is included

Disaster Recovery in St Louis: what NetSys delivers

Protection for every copy

Server, virtual machine and cloud workload backups with immutable copies off site
Independent backup of the Microsoft 365 tenant, because the recycle bin is not a backup

Tested recovery

Recovery objectives per system, agreed before an outage forces the decision
Scheduled restores with the measured time sent to you in writing

Continuity when the office is down

Staff working from home on current data while the office has no power or access
Phones redirected and clients reached through paths that do not depend on the office network

Published case study

Large international food importer: the whole platform rebuilt in Azure after a weather outage

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 for days. NetSys assessed every workload with recovery objectives per system, moved the SQL environment to Azure SQL Managed Instance and the file shares to Azure Files, published applications through Azure Virtual Desktop, connected the warehouses by VPN and layered immutable backups and a tested disaster-recovery runbook on top. The migration took ten weeks with a weekend cut-over.

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 St Louis client.

What backup and disaster recovery costs in St Louis

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 St Louis: FAQs

How does backup and disaster recovery work for St. Louis organizations?

We design the backup set from a list of your systems and their recovery targets, ship any appliance configured, and run everything else remotely: scheduled backups, replication outside the region, monitoring of every job and fixes for failures. Restore tests run on a calendar and each result is written up. If a server dies or ransomware strikes, recovery starts from Brooklyn at any hour, because monitoring and emergency service run 24/7. NetSys does not send engineers on site in St. Louis, so replacement hardware ships ready to connect.

How much does backup and disaster recovery cost in St. Louis?

Pricing follows what you protect: each server, each Microsoft 365 user and the backup appliance, which can be bundled into the monthly fee or bought outright. The biggest variables are the amount of data, how fast each system must come back, whether recovery must be able to run in the cloud while the office is unusable, and how often you want restores tested and reported. We quote from an inventory of systems and recovery targets, and the agreement runs month to month.

How do we recover a St. Louis business after ransomware or an outage?

First, contain: isolate affected machines and disable compromised accounts so the backups are not attacked too. Second, confirm a clean restore point, which immutable backups make possible because ransomware cannot alter them. Third, restore in the order your recovery register sets, usually identity and email, then the core application and its data, then file shares and individual computers. After a building loss, servers can run virtually in the Datto cloud or Azure while staff work from home on laptops. Every one of the 30-plus ransomware cases NetSys has handled in three years was fully recovered.

Is Microsoft 365 already backed up?

Not in the way most businesses assume. Microsoft keeps its service running and offers retention features, but deleted items age out, a malicious administrator or a ransomware sync can damage files at scale, and restoring a whole mailbox or SharePoint site from retention is slow or impossible. We add a separate cloud-to-cloud backup of Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams with its own retention and its own credentials, so a compromised Microsoft 365 account cannot delete the backups.

How often should restores be tested?

At least quarterly for each critical system, and after any major change such as a server migration or a new application. Our tests restore real data, start virtual copies of servers to prove they boot, and time the recovery against the target in your register. Each test produces a short report: what was restored, how long it took, and anything that failed and how it was fixed. Those reports are what an auditor, a cyber insurer or a hospital customer's questionnaire usually asks to see.

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