Your recovery, rehearsed, so the worst day stays under control. Backups that restore within the time you can afford to lose.
A backup is a promise until something restores from it. We test yours monthly and check their integrity every two days. The same discipline goes into the failover, the kit underneath it and the disaster-recovery plan that holds the three together. Some clients come to us during an incident; others are stable and want to be sure.
A backup that runs is not a recovery that works.
A backup job reports plenty, but none of it answers the question that matters on the day: would the business be running again inside the time it can afford to lose.
Last night's job finished clean.
Every agent checked in, the schedule held, no errors logged. The job ran as instructed, which is a far lower bar than a real recovery.
The retention rules are all passing.
Storage is inside budget, the dashboard is green end to end. It proves the data was written. It says nothing about whether that data reads back, or how long it takes to.
The nightly report lands in an inbox.
Usually filed unread, and only read closely once something has already failed. By then it records the problem rather than resolving it.
Many setups run this way for years, trusted but never tested, until the day a restore is needed and falls short.
What the resilience work covers.
High availability sets what a single dead component costs you. We design the failover to match the workload and what the business can actually lose, then prove it falls over before anyone signs it off. Where active-passive meets the target, we will not specify active-active and the licensing it carries.
Under the applications sits everything that carries them: power, cooling, hosts, network paths and storage. We put each workload where its economics point, whether that is your own racks, ours, or the cloud. Our Cardiff datacentre, Secure Managed Cloud, runs to a 99.98% monthly and 99.99% annual SLA when that is the right home for it: under ten minutes of downtime in a month, under an hour across a year. Either way you leave with a capacity plan and a refresh path you can see coming, so the next hardware decision is planned in advance rather than rushed.
Backups depend entirely on what you are running, and most arrive needing work. We architect to a backup product we trust, then keep it verified: a full restore tested monthly, integrity checks every two days, and continued ownership rather than a one-off sign-off.
The disaster-recovery plan ties the rest together. Most businesses can put a figure on an hour offline, and the targets are worth setting against that. Recovery time and recovery point targets are agreed in writing with the people who own the services, so the decision on the day is how to execute, not what we promised. A runbook clear enough to follow under pressure, out of hours. Where ransomware is the threat, copies are held isolated from your live environment, beyond the reach of an intruder already inside, with Factor1 providing independent assurance.
What you walk away with.
Four deliverables at the end of the engagement, written for the person who has to sign them off.
Recovery times you can commit to.
We set what your plan promises against what the design would really deliver, and state the difference plainly. Where a contract or insurer has fixed the figure, we close the gap before it is tested in a real event.
A runbook that matches the system you have now.
Plans drift as people move on and dependencies change. We check yours against the live system and confirm it with a fresh restore, so the documented steps are the ones that work during an incident.
Your standby kept in step with live.
Versions, settings and dependencies reconciled across both, so failover puts you on a known configuration. We agree the change process that keeps them matched, so the gap does not reopen over successive change windows.
A restore proven on whatever you back up to.
When the backup tooling changes, the recovery you relied on is unproven again until something reads back from it. We run and time a real restore, so it is confirmed before an incident tests it.
Who holds what, decided with you.
How far we take it is your decision, and it need not mean handing over day-to-day operations. Your team can keep running backups on the tooling they know, keep the on-call rota, keep the relationships with vendors and auditors. We take on the design: the recovery targets, the plan, the testing that proves it, and a regular review as the system changes. Where you would rather we ran more of it, we will, agreed with you.
Yours to keep, if you want it
- Running the backups on the tooling your team already knows.
- The on-call rota and first response that already work for you.
- The relationships with your vendors, insurer and auditor.
Ours to carry
- Recovery time and recovery point targets, signed off in writing.
- The disaster-recovery plan and the runbook that carries it out.
- Restore testing and a design review on the cycle we agree with you.
A resilience review, ending in a real restore.
We review the whole design, then prove one restore end to end.
We go through the failover, the kit that carries it, the backup setup and the disaster-recovery plan. Then we close by restoring from your own backups into an isolated target and timing it.
- Scope
- Set with you on the first call, around what you actually run. Nothing off the shelf.
- Proof
- A full restore from your own backups, into an isolated target, timed and written down.
- Commercials
- A fixed price agreed before any work begins. No time-based billing.
Factor1 tests defences on a schedule and remediates what it finds, so resilience gets proven rather than assumed.
Resilience is one piece. We look after the whole.
Under one agreement, the estate is watched, maintained and documented as a single thing, by the team behind this page.
…and everything between.
Tell us where your recovery stands today.
A senior engineer who would run the work joins from the first call. Bring your recovery targets, the date of your last restore, and the part of the setup that concerns you most. You will get a clear view of what we would address first.
