Business Continuity — New York / Tri-State
Backup and disaster recovery for New York businesses.
Backups that cannot be altered, restores that have actually been watched succeeding, and a recovery plan your team has rehearsed — because the day you need them is the wrong day to find out.
An untested backup is a hypothesis
Almost every organization we assess has backups. Far fewer have watched one restore. The gap between those two statements is where businesses get lost: jobs that quietly stopped running months ago, retention policies that silently excluded a critical share, backup credentials sitting in the same identity system an attacker just took over.
Ransomware operators understand this better than most IT departments. Finding and destroying backups is a standard early step in an intrusion, precisely because organizations that can restore do not pay. A backup that can be deleted by a stolen admin credential is not a control — it is a hope.
So Stedholm treats continuity as two disciplines that share one test. Managed backup keeps immutable, monitored copies of everything that matters and proves — on a schedule, with recorded results — that they restore. Disaster recovery plans and rehearses the larger question: how the business keeps operating while systems come back.
01 — The two disciplines
Backup keeps the data. DR keeps the business.
Backup
Managed Backup
Immutable, monitored backup for servers, endpoints, and Microsoft 365 — with restore tests on a published cadence and reports you can hand to an insurer.
Recovery
Disaster Recovery (BCDR)
RTO and RPO targets chosen deliberately, runbooks that name people and steps, and recovery rehearsed — tabletop and hands-on — before it is real.
Continuity is now a written requirement, not a virtue
If NYDFS regulates you, this is no longer optional: 23 NYCRR 500 requires incident response and BCDR plans, requires that they be tested, and requires backups protected from unauthorized alteration or destruction — which is a regulator asking for immutability by name.
The pattern repeats across regimes. HIPAA’s Security Rule requires a contingency plan — data backup, disaster recovery, and emergency-mode operation. The FTC Safeguards Rule requires a written incident response plan. And cyber-insurance applications now ask pointed, checkable questions about offline or immutable copies and tested restores.
We build continuity to produce evidence as a byproduct: dated restore-test reports and rehearsal records you can hand to an examiner, an auditor, or an underwriter instead of an assurance.
Where continuity is required
NYDFS 23 NYCRR 500 — BCDR plans and protected backups
HIPAA — contingency planning
FTC Safeguards Rule — incident response
CMMC / NIST 800-171 — protected backup media
Cyber-insurance applications and renewals
Common questions
We already have backups through our current IT provider. What would change?
Often the product stays and the discipline changes: a written scope of exactly what is covered, immutability verified rather than assumed, restore tests on a schedule with recorded results, and reporting you can show a third party. If your current setup already does all of that, we will tell you so in the assessment.
How often do you test restores?
On a cadence set in the agreement, by system tier — the systems your business stops without get tested more often than the archive server. What we do not do is skip systems: everything in scope gets restored on schedule, and the results are reported with timings, not a green checkmark.
Does Microsoft 365 back itself up?
No. Retention settings and recycle bins are recovery conveniences with expiration dates, not backup — and Microsoft’s shared-responsibility model puts your data explicitly on your side of the line. We back up Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams data independently. See Microsoft 365 services.
What do RTO and RPO mean?
How long you can afford to be down, and how much recent work you can afford to lose — the two numbers under every recovery decision. Choosing them deliberately, per system, is most of what disaster recovery planning is.
Will this satisfy our cyber-insurance application?
We operate the controls those applications commonly ask about — immutable copies, MFA on backup infrastructure, tested restores — and we keep the dated evidence, so you can answer accurately. No provider can honestly guarantee any carrier’s underwriting decision, and we will not pretend to.
Find out whether your backups restore.
An assessment covers what you back up, what has never been tested, and what a bad week would actually cost you.