HSM IT ServicesBackup and Disaster Recovery in St. Albert
Tested, protected backups and a recovery plan that brings your business back after any disruption.
Clinics and professional offices in St. Albert have legal duties to retain and protect records, and tested backups with documented restores help demonstrate that those records remain available and intact.
A backup is only valuable if it can be restored when you need it. Many organizations discover during a crisis that backups stopped running months ago, never included key systems, or were encrypted by the same ransomware that hit production. Our Backup and Disaster Recovery is built to avoid those surprises. We identify what needs protecting, how much data you can afford to lose and how quickly each system must be back, then design backups to match.
Our approach follows the widely used 3-2-1 principle: multiple copies, on different media, with at least one stored off site. Backups are protected with immutability or isolation so attackers with administrative access cannot delete them. Microsoft 365 data, which Microsoft does not back up in the way most people assume, is included. Every backup job is monitored, failures are investigated, and restore tests are performed on a schedule rather than assumed.
Backup and Disaster Recovery for St. Albert organizations
Many St. Albert businesses are small professional and health offices where one person often ends up handling IT on top of their regular job. These offices tend to rely on practice management or accounting software, cloud email and a handful of workstations, and they need dependable backups and patching more than complex infrastructure. Owners who also have staff or offices in Edmonton benefit from shared, consistently managed systems. As an immediate neighbour of Edmonton, St. Albert receives both on-site and remote support.
What is included
- Backup design based on recovery time and recovery point needs
- Server, workstation and virtual machine backup
- Microsoft 365 mailbox, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams backup
- Immutable or isolated copies protected from ransomware
- Encrypted off-site and Canadian cloud storage options
- Daily backup monitoring and failure follow-up
- Scheduled restore testing with documented results
- Written disaster recovery plan and tabletop review
On site and remote in St. Albert
In St. Albert, HSM IT Services works both remotely and on site. Most problems are fixed over the phone or a remote session, and a technician comes to you when the job needs hands: new cabling, a camera install, a failed switch or a new hire's desk.
How we start
Assess
We identify critical systems and data and agree on acceptable downtime and data loss for each.
Design
We select backup methods, storage locations and protections that meet those targets.
Protect
We deploy and monitor backups, resolving failures and keeping coverage current as systems change.
Test
We perform restore tests and walk through the recovery plan with your team to confirm it works.
Common in St. Albert
Many of the St. Albert organizations we talk to work in dental offices, engineering and professional services, medical clinics, retail. Each has its own mix of software, compliance rules and on-site equipment, and we plan backup and disaster recovery around it.
Backup and Disaster Recovery in St. Albert: questions
How often should backups be tested?
Testing frequency depends on how critical the data is and how often systems change, but backups should be tested regularly, not only after something breaks. HSM IT Services performs scheduled restore tests for files, systems and Microsoft 365 data, records the results and fixes any problems found, so you have evidence that recovery will work.
Where would a St. Albert business recover to after a disaster?
That depends on your systems and priorities. For many organizations in St. Albert, the answer is cloud-based recovery, where critical servers can be started in a secure Canadian data centre while staff connect from home or a temporary location. Others need replacement hardware at an alternate site. Your recovery plan documents the approach in advance.
Can ransomware encrypt our backups?
It can if the backups are reachable with the same credentials attackers steal, which is a common weakness. HSM IT Services uses immutable storage, separate credentials and isolated copies so that backup data cannot be changed or deleted from your production network. We also monitor for suspicious changes to backup jobs and settings.