Managed Disaster Recovery in Portugal: Contracted RPO and RTO, Immutable Backups and Tested Recovery

A backup guarantees that the data exists somewhere else. It does not say where it will be restored if the server has burnt down, who does it, in what order or how long it takes. Some companies with perfect backups stay down for three days because they lack those answers.

Managed backups, with local and off-site copies and tested restores, are the foundation. The recovery plan is what is built on top.

RPO — how much work you can lose

The Recovery Point Objective measures, in time, the work the company accepts losing. With an RPO of 24 hours you lose, in the worst case, a day; with 15 minutes you need near-continuous replication. A clinic with 80 appointments a day and an accountant at month-end need very different values.

RTO — how quickly you are operating again

The Recovery Time Objective is the time between the disaster and critical systems working again. It defines the architecture: with two days, it is enough to have somewhere to restore; with two hours, you need replicas ready to go. It goes into the contract and is measured in every test.

Both are set system by system, based on the real cost of an hour of downtime, and do not have to be the same for everything.

The most likely scenario in Portugal is not fire: it is encryption spreading across the network overnight. A plan designed for ransomware has three defences that a generic plan does not.

• Immutable backups Not even an attacker with administrator credentials can encrypt or delete them.
• Isolation before start-up The network is segmented so the replica is not infected when it comes up.
• A clean restore point Identified with certainty, because yesterday's backup may already contain the ransomware.

Without a plan in advance, the job becomes business data recovery: slower, more expensive and with no guarantees. This scenario overlaps with managed cybersecurity and with the obligations of NIS2 for companies in Portugal.

1. Impact analysis — which systems stop the business, how long is tolerable and what each hour costs.
2. Reinforced 3-2-1 rule — three copies, two media, one off site and an immutable version for critical systems.
3. Replicas of critical servers — in a datacentre in Portugal or in the cloud, ready to start without waiting for hardware.
4. Contingency communications — phones and email working while the main infrastructure is down, including the cloud or on-premises phone system and Microsoft 365.
5. Written procedure — who declares the disaster, who is notified, recovery order, contacts and credentials, stored outside the systems to be recovered.
6. Tests with a report — one full test a year and quarterly partial tests, with the actual time compared with the RTO.
7. Return to normal — the path back from the replica to the main infrastructure, without losing the work done in the meantime.

• Impact per system RPO, RTO and the estimated cost of an hour of downtime.
• Map of copies and replicas Where each copy is, frequency, which is immutable and how far back you can go.
• Activation procedure Owners, recovery order and credentials stored outside the infrastructure.
• Communications plan How to keep serving clients during the outage.
• Test reports Measured times and corrections agreed after each rehearsal.

The União das Freguesias de Massamá e Monte Abraão, a local authority near Lisbon, awarded DataRoad a 2022 public contract for a new server, a UPS system and corporate backups: processing power, power that survives an outage and recoverable data. With a public service counter, downtime means a service that is not delivered.

The ongoing management contract, renewed through tender, adds monitoring and support under the Premium 365 regime (24×7) to detect incidents before they reach the counter.

Managed backups and monitoring are in every IT Unlimited plan. The full plan — replicas, written procedure and recovery tests — is included in IT Unlimited Premium 365, designed for companies that cannot stop, and can be contracted as a project by Essential and Premium clients.

It complements NOC monitoring, continuous on Premium 365, and is part of DataRoad's managed IT services.

Four to eight weeks, for a company with 20 to 50 workstations and one or two servers. Analysis and design take two to four weeks; replicas and immutable copies, another two to four. The first full test takes place within the first three months.

We start with the impact analysis with management, because it is management that knows what an hour of downtime costs. If you already have backups and only want to know whether you could recover from them, the test can be done on its own, as an IT consultancy project with a written report.

We design and test plans for clients throughout Portugal, from our headquarters in Alfragide (Lisbon), with on-site work mainly in Greater Lisbon, and remote support for companies in Europe and the USA. See the managed networks and IT pages for Lisbon, Cascais, Oeiras, Sintra, Leiria, Coimbra and Porto, or all areas covered.

Useful reading: could your company survive an 8-hour blackout? · the 30-minute restore test · the cost of an hour of downtime.

Not how quickly you would like to be — how quickly you actually could be. The first analysis carries no commitment. Service provided exclusively under an IT Unlimited contract; we do not carry out one-off interventions or sell standalone equipment.

More than 10 workstations · support contract · remote, on-site and phone support.

+351 211 459 950* (working days, 9:30–13:00 and 14:00–18:30, Lisbon time) · sales@dataroad.pt

*Call to a Portuguese landline.