Email us at sales@ocgl.net
Email us at sales@ocgl.net
Managed
Business Solutions
Nearly half of Canadian organizations faced a cyber attack last year — and for a small business, downtime is the real cost. Our Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solutions go beyond backup: tested restores, rapid failover, and a clear recovery plan keep your business running through ransomware, hardware failure, or disaster — with your data protected in Canada.
Source: CIRA 2025 Cybersecurity Survey
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Most businesses have backups. Far fewer have proven they can restore from them. That gap is where the damage happens. A backup job that reports success every night can still be useless if it is missing a database, if the retention window is shorter than the time it took to notice the problem, or if nobody has ever timed a full restore. Therefore we treat data backup and recovery in Vancouver as one discipline, not two. The question is never "is it backed up?" It is "how long until we are running again, and how much work will we have lost?"
Recovery time is how long you are down. Recovery point is how much data you lose — the gap between your last good backup and the moment things broke. Both cost money, and both cost more to shorten. Consequently the right design is the one that matches what your business can actually absorb. A firm that can work on paper for a day needs something very different from one where an hour of downtime stops billing entirely. We work these out with you before choosing any technology.
Two things make backup planning in this region different from the generic advice you will find online.
The building is part of the risk model. Vancouver sits in an active seismic zone, and the same downtown towers that make good offices concentrate a lot of businesses into a few postcodes. A backup that lives in the server cupboard down the hall is not a backup from the one event most likely to close your office. Off-site replication is not a luxury here; it is the reason the plan works.
Somebody has to physically show up. Recovery is rarely purely remote. Hardware fails, replacements need racking, and a workforce that has lost its files needs someone in the room. We attend on-site across Metro Vancouver, and we support clients across Canada, coast to coast.
Beyond that, the practical realities are the ones every business here recognises: winter storm outages on the North Shore and in the Fraser Valley, a workforce split between the office and home, and the fact that most small businesses discover their recovery plan is theoretical at the worst possible moment.
We support businesses across British Columbia and Alberta — Metro Vancouver, Vancouver Island, the Interior and the north, along with Edmonton and Calgary — and work with clients anywhere in Canada from our Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto locations.
Image-based backup of physical and virtual servers, with the ability to spin a failed server back up rather than rebuild it from scratch. Microsoft 365 is the one most businesses get wrong, and it has its own section below. Line-of-business and SaaS systems are often the least protected, because they sit outside the normal backup scope. We find them during assessment.
Server backup has different requirements from workstation backup. A file server can be restored file by file, but a domain controller, an SQL instance or a line of business application server has to come back as a working system, with its state intact and in the right order.
We take image-level backups of physical and virtual servers, keep a local copy for speed and an offsite copy in Canada for safety, and verify both. For the systems that cannot wait, we can stand the server up in the cloud and run the business from there while the original is rebuilt.
This is the single most common misunderstanding we correct. Microsoft runs on a shared responsibility model: Microsoft keeps the service running, and you stay responsible for the data inside it. That is in the Microsoft Services Agreement, and it surprises most business owners.
The built-in safety nets are short-term by design. Deleted Exchange items last around 30 days. SharePoint and OneDrive hold deleted content for roughly 93 days. After that it is gone. Those tools protect you from someone emptying the wrong folder on a Tuesday. They do not protect you from a departure nobody noticed for four months, a compromised account quietly deleting mail, or a compliance hold that needs seven years.
Microsoft does sell a paid add-on, Microsoft 365 Backup, which extends retention to one year. It still leaves gaps: it covers Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive but not Teams chat, Planner or Power Platform data, retention stops at twelve months, and the backup sits inside the same Microsoft cloud as the thing it is protecting.
We deploy Datto SaaS Protection instead — independent, immutable, with retention you set rather than inherit, and coverage that extends to Entra ID identity data. If you want the full comparison, we have written it up: Microsoft 365 backup vs Datto SaaS Protection: the real gaps.
Small businesses are often sold either a consumer file-sync tool or an enterprise platform priced for a company ten times their size. Neither fits. What a fifteen- to seventy-seat business usually needs is straightforward: servers and endpoints imaged, Microsoft 365 protected independently, off-site copies held in Canada, and someone who notices when a job fails.
The thing that separates a real service from a licence resale is the last part. A cloud backup nobody is watching will fail silently and stay failed. Monitoring is included in every arrangement we run.
A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis. We agree a restore-test cadence with you as part of your service level, then run the tests and report the results. How often depends on what your business can absorb — an environment where an hour of downtime stops billing is tested more frequently than one that can work on paper for a day. Either way you know your recovery plan works before you need it, rather than discovering the gap in the middle of an incident.
Backup is a copy. Disaster recovery is the plan that turns that copy back into a working business, and it is the part most organisations have never written down. A disaster recovery plan names who declares an incident, which systems come back first, where staff work while the office is unavailable, and how you operate on paper until the systems return.
We build both. Backup gives you the data; the disaster recovery runbook gives you the sequence, the owners and the timings. We rehearse it, because the first time you use a runbook should not be the day you need it.
Modern ransomware looks for backups first. If your backup server is on the same domain, reachable over the same network, using the same credentials, it is part of the attack surface rather than the answer to it. Because of that, we design backups to be isolated and immutable, so copies cannot be altered or deleted inside the retention window even by an attacker with administrative access. Recovery then becomes a decision you make, rather than a ransom you negotiate. Paying funds the next attack, and it comes with no guarantee of working decryption keys. A strong recovery posture is what removes the leverage. Our ransomware recovery playbook walks through what the first forty-eight hours actually look like.
Data residency comes up in almost every conversation now, and usually not because of a regulation. It is because somebody else asked first — a client running a vendor security review, an insurer at renewal, or a contract that specifies where information may be stored.
Your protected data is held in Canada. That is a simple answer to give, and it removes a question that otherwise stalls procurement. Where your obligations are genuinely legal rather than contractual, we will help you document what is in place, but we are not lawyers and will say so — that conversation belongs with your counsel, and we would rather flag it than guess.
We monitor every backup job daily, investigate failures rather than waiting for them to clear themselves, and keep retention aligned to whatever obligations you carry. Backup sits inside our managed IT solutions, alongside the cyber security monitoring that should catch an incident before recovery is needed at all. If your workloads are moving, our cloud migration team makes sure protection moves with them instead of being rebuilt afterwards, and where the recovery target depends on the hardware underneath it, our IT infrastructure team sizes that too. Our support desk is open 6:00 am to 11:00 pm Pacific, seven days a week.
Is Microsoft 365 already backed up? No. Retention is not backup. See the section above, or the full comparison.
How quickly can we be running again? That is the recovery-time target, and it is a design decision rather than a fixed number. We size it to what your business can absorb and tell you honestly what each level costs.
Do you replace our existing backup or work with it? Either. Plenty of engagements start as an assessment of what you already have, and sometimes the answer is that it is fine and just needs monitoring.
What happens during an actual disaster? You call the number, a named engineer owns the recovery, and the plan we tested is the plan we run. If you want to read the detail first, start with our backup and recovery best practices.
1-866-800-OPUS (6787)