Disaster season is no longer just a regional concern, it’s a year-round business continuity challenge. Hurricanes, cyberattacks, ransomware, and unexpected outages continue to threaten operations. To stay resilient, businesses must move beyond simple backups and evolve into full IT resilience.
This guide outlines what businesses must do to prepare for storms, cyber threats, and disruptions with a modern, proactive approach to IT, data protection, and recovery.
Understanding the Core Message of Backup Readiness
Many organizations assume that “someone” is handling backups. But in a disaster, that assumption becomes a risk. Even when backups exist, if no one knows:
- What’s being backed up
- Where is it stored
- How to restore it
…the data may be useless when it’s needed most.
In 2025, backup readiness must evolve from simply “having backups” to ensuring backups are tested, secured, resilient, and integrated into an overall IT resilience plan.
Top Actions for Disaster & IT Resilience Preparedness
These key action steps will ensure your business is resilient before, during, and after a disaster.
- Backup Verification & Coverage
- ✅ Incorporate Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) into your plan
- ✅ Add cloud failover solutions for critical workloads
- ✅ Plan for remote work contingencies if primary sites are unavailable
- ✅ Use immutable backups that cannot be altered or deleted by malware
- ✅ Maintain offline or air-gapped backup copies
- ✅ Monitor backups for unusual delta changes (a warning sign of ransomware activity)
Also, ensure backups are encrypted and protected against tampering.
- Secure Access & Reporting
- ✅ Request or verify login credentials for your backup portals (e.g., portal.tkscloud.com)
- ✅ Review last backup dates and replication statuses (green = healthy)
- ✅ Assign role-based access for staff who need backup or restore permissions
- ✅ Document credentials and access instructions in disaster recovery docs
Pro Tip: Use real-time dashboards instead of static reports:
• Provide live status updates via web or mobile portals
• Integrate alerts into Slack, Microsoft Teams, or SMS notifications
• Offer executive-friendly dashboards alongside IT technical views
Ready to Turn Your Backup Strategy into Peace of Mind?
- Test Restore Capabilities
- ✅ Perform test restores: single file, full folder, and entire server
- ✅ Track recovery time and identify bottlenecks
- ✅ Document the process and lessons learned
Many cloud services—including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce—do not include full backup and recovery by default.
✅ Implement third-party SaaS backup tools to cover:
• Emails & calendars
• Shared files & drives
• Teams/Slack channels
✅ Verify backup frequency, retention, and restore testing for SaaS apps.
- Communicate with Leadership
- ✅ Share a high-level summary of backup health with executives
- ✅ Include who is responsible for restoring
- ✅ Clarify recovery timelines for critical scenarios
✅Tailor communications for different roles:
• Executives: one-page summary or infographic
• IT team: detailed step-by-step plan
✅ Use multi-format delivery to ensure everyone understands the plan, including infographics, cheat sheets, and explainer videos for training.
- Alerts and Monitoring
- ✅ Set up alerts for backup failures and high data change rates
- ✅ Assign response roles for IT or MSP teams
- ✅ Ensure alerts reach staff even during outages (text, Slack, or Teams)
Consider adding AI-powered monitoring tools to detect anomalies in backup data, flag storage spikes, or warn of suspicious activities before a breach escalates.
Check out our helpful resources for more info:
Final Recommendations: Backup → Resilience
To recap, ensure your business:
- ✅ Has verified backups for all critical systems
- ✅ Understands retention settings and restore capabilities
- ✅ Has tested disaster scenarios and recovery speed
- ✅ Protects backups from cyber threats
- ✅ Has documented procedures and leadership alignment
- ✅ Uses modern tools and AI for backup monitoring
In 2025, disaster preparedness isn’t just about having backups, it’s about having confidence that you can restore, recover, and resume operations no matter the crisis.
By modernizing your backup strategy with DRaaS, ransomware defenses, SaaS backups, real-time dashboards, AI monitoring, and tested recovery, you’ll shift from reactive backups to proactive IT resilience.
