Cloud Backup & Disaster Recovery for Melbourne Businesses

Backup is the creation of copies of your data — ensuring that if data is deleted, corrupted, or encrypted by ransomware, you have a clean copy to restore from. Disaster recovery is the broader capability to restore your entire business operations after a catastrophic event — not just data, but systems, configurations, and applications. Disaster recovery requires not just backups, but documented procedures, tested failover capabilities, and defined recovery time objectives. CX IT Services provides both: managed backup for your data and DR planning and testing for your operations.

Backup frequency should match your Recovery Point Objective — the maximum amount of data loss your business can tolerate. For most Melbourne businesses, we recommend hourly or continuous backups for critical systems (file servers, databases, email) and daily backups for less critical workloads. For Microsoft 365 — which is not automatically backed up by Microsoft — we implement daily third-party backups with 90-day retention. The right frequency depends on your specific operations and data change rates.

No — this is one of the most common misconceptions among Melbourne businesses. Microsoft 365 provides basic recycle bin and version history features, but these are not backups. Microsoft's responsibility is infrastructure availability, not data protection. Deleted items in Exchange Online are retained for 30 days by default (93 days with litigation hold), but there is no granular restore capability for items deleted beyond that retention period. CX IT Services implements dedicated Microsoft 365 backup solutions that provide true point-in-time recovery for Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams.

Immutable storage is backup storage that cannot be modified or deleted — by anyone, including administrators — for a defined retention period. Modern ransomware attacks specifically target backup systems: they identify backup software, disable backup jobs, and delete backup data before encrypting your live systems, ensuring you cannot recover without paying the ransom. Immutable storage breaks this attack pattern: even if ransomware compromises every other system in your environment, the immutable backup copies cannot be deleted or encrypted.

Restore time depends on what you are restoring and how. A single file restore takes seconds to minutes. A full virtual machine restore using Veeam Instant Recovery can make a VM available in minutes (running directly from the backup file) with permanent restore completing in hours. Full environment disaster recovery — rebuilding everything from scratch — takes longer and is why we define and test RTO for every client environment. We document the actual restore times from our regular tests so you have realistic expectations.

Most Melbourne businesses we onboard have one of three backup situations: no backup at all, a backup solution that has never been tested, or a backup solution where some systems are not included. CX IT Services starts with a backup audit — confirming what is and is not protected, testing existing restores, and identifying gaps. We then implement a comprehensive solution with monitoring, regular tested restores, and monthly reporting. The key difference is not the technology — it is the active management and regular testing that most businesses lack.

Yes, significantly. Cyber insurance applications now ask specifically whether you have tested your backups within the past 12 months and whether you maintain offline or immutable backup copies. Businesses that answer yes to both questions are viewed as substantially lower risk — which translates to lower premiums and better coverage terms. We provide a backup testing certificate after each quarterly restore test that documents what was tested, when, and the outcome. This is exactly the evidence cyber insurers request during the application and renewal process.

Backup costs have two components: our management fee and the underlying storage costs. Azure Backup storage for a typical Melbourne SMB with 5-10 servers runs $150-400 AUD per month in Azure consumption. Our management fee — covering monitoring, monthly reporting, and quarterly restore testing — starts from $300 per month depending on the number of systems protected. We provide a detailed cost model during scoping so you know exactly what you will pay before any work begins. When weighed against the cost of a ransomware recovery without working backups, the investment is straightforward to justify.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum time your business can be without a system before the impact becomes unacceptable — for example, 4 hours for your file server. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data loss you can tolerate — for example, 1 hour, meaning backups must run at least hourly. For most Melbourne SMBs, a realistic RTO of 2-4 hours and RPO of 1-4 hours is achievable with cloud backup. We work with your management team to define appropriate RTO and RPO for each system, then design and test the backup solution to meet those objectives — with documented evidence.

Melbourne law firms have layered data retention obligations: matter files must be retained for 7 years after matter closure under the Legal Profession Uniform Law, trust account records for 7 years, and certain categories of documents longer. Our backup solution for legal practices includes: daily backups with retention policies mapped to your specific document categories, immutable storage to prevent ransomware from destroying matter records, and quarterly restore tests with documented evidence. We also configure Microsoft 365 retention labels in SharePoint and Exchange to ensure email and documents are retained correctly — and provide the audit trail your insurer and the Legal Services Board may require.