Services
Disaster Recovery Services & Business Continuity Planning
A backup is a copy of your data. Business continuity is whether the company still functions on day two of an outage. Braintek builds, tests, and maintains disaster recovery and business continuity plans for Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth businesses, so ransomware, a hurricane, a freeze, or a dead server becomes a documented procedure instead of a scramble.
Schedule a Discovery CallWhat's Included
- Business impact analysis We map which systems and processes actually keep revenue moving, and what an hour, a day, or a week without each one costs, so recovery spending matches business reality.
- Written disaster recovery plan A plan your team can actually run, systems in restore order, recovery time and recovery point targets per system, backup locations and credentials, and named roles for the first hours.
- Business continuity planning Beyond systems, how the business keeps operating, where people work when the office is dark, how you reach staff and customers without company email, and who decides what.
- Recovery infrastructure Immutable off site backups, cloud failover where the targets justify it, and standby capacity sized to your real recovery time objectives, not a one size fits all bundle.
- Scheduled testing Quarterly restore tests and an annual walkthrough of the full plan, because a plan that has never been rehearsed is a guess.
- Plan maintenance The plan stays current through staff changes, new systems, and office moves, instead of aging into historical fiction on a shared drive.
Why Braintek
Braintek has supported Gulf Coast businesses from Spring, TX since 2002, which means hurricane seasons, floods, and multi day freezes are routine planning work for us, not a specialty. We build continuity plans against the disasters this region actually delivers, and we test them, so the plan you show your insurer is a plan that has been run.
Schedule a Discovery CallDisaster recovery services restore your systems, data, and operations after ransomware, hardware failure, fire, flood, or an extended outage. Business continuity planning is the discipline around it: knowing in advance what comes back first, how fast, who does what, and how the business keeps functioning in the meantime. Braintek provides both for businesses across Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, and we test what we build.
The distinction from backup matters. Our backup services make sure a clean, immutable copy of your data always exists. This service is about everything a copy of your data doesn’t answer: how long a full restore actually takes, which of your systems can tolerate a day down and which can’t tolerate an hour, where your team works when the office has no power, and who talks to customers, the insurance carrier, and staff while it’s all happening. Businesses that skip this layer usually keep their data and lose their week.
What does business continuity planning actually look like?
It starts with a business impact analysis, a structured look at what each system outage really costs you, because the answer decides everything downstream. The ERP that stops revenue might justify rapid cloud failover, while the archive server can wait days on a standard restore. From there we write the plan, five sections, a few pages, every line true: systems in restore order, recovery targets per system, backup locations and access, named roles, and communication paths that survive the outage. Our disaster recovery plan guide walks through the format in detail if you want to see the shape of it.
Then we test it, quarterly restore tests with a stopwatch and an annual walkthrough with the named people on a call. Every plan fails its first walkthrough somewhere. Finding that failure on a calm Tuesday, not during the event, is most of the value.
Planning for Houston weather, not just ransomware
A generic continuity plan assumes the disaster is sudden and local. Gulf Coast disasters are often neither: a hurricane gives days of warning and can take power for a week or more across the whole region, which changes the plan’s shape. Off site has to mean out of the flood plain, not across the parking lot. The plan needs a pre landfall checklist, what gets shut down cleanly, who works remotely and how, and the threshold for failing over to cloud infrastructure versus waiting out the outage. Freezes deliver the same shape with less warning, as most of Texas learned in 2021. Our hurricane and freeze continuity guide for Houston manufacturers shows how we work through a season for one industry; the method generalizes.
How it fits your IT
Continuity planning folds naturally into managed IT services, because the plan is only as current as the inventory behind it, and someone has to own the testing calendar. The recovery infrastructure itself, immutable backups, cloud failover, standby capacity, often builds on Azure, and pairs with cybersecurity services so ransomware is contained early and recovery is the fallback rather than the whole defense. If you’re starting from zero, a free risk assessment will tell you what your current backups could genuinely deliver today, which is the honest baseline every plan starts from.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity?
Disaster recovery is getting systems and data running again after an event. Business continuity is broader, keeping the business itself operating while that happens, where people work, how customers are handled, who decides what, and in what order revenue critical work resumes. A complete plan covers both, and we build them together.
What does a business continuity plan include?
Five core pieces: a system inventory in restore priority order, recovery time and recovery point targets for each system, backup locations and who can reach them, named roles for the first hours, and a communication plan that works when company email is down. For a 10 to 100 person business this fits in a few pages, provided the pages are true and tested.
What disasters should a Houston business plan for?
Statistically, ransomware and hardware failure top the list everywhere. The Gulf Coast adds hurricanes, flooding, and extended power loss, and Texas winters have shown multi day freezes belong on the list too. The mechanics barely change by cause, every scenario reduces to restoring operations from copies and capacity the event couldn't touch.
How much do disaster recovery services cost?
For most clients, disaster recovery planning, testing, and monitoring are part of managed IT support, which typically runs $150 to $250 per device per month, with backup and failover infrastructure sized to your recovery targets. Standalone continuity planning engagements are quoted from a business impact analysis, and aggressive recovery time targets cost more than relaxed ones, which is why we set them per system instead of across the board.
Do you serve Dallas-Fort Worth as well as Houston?
Yes. We provide disaster recovery and business continuity services across both metros, with the same tested plan model. DFW trades hurricane exposure for tornado and ice storm risk, and the plan accounts for the difference.
We already have backups. Do we still need this?
Almost certainly. Backups answer whether your data survives, continuity planning answers how long the business is down, who does what, and what customers are told while systems come back. Plenty of businesses with intact backups have lost a week to not knowing the restore order or where the credentials lived.
Will this satisfy our cyber insurance or client requirements?
Yes, that's a common trigger for the engagement. Insurers and enterprise clients increasingly ask for a documented, tested recovery plan, and we produce the plan plus the test records that make the answer honest.
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