Original Content Date: May 2023 / Updated: February 2026
When a cyber-attack or system failure strikes, how quickly could your business recover? For many organisations across Manchester and the wider UK, the honest answer is an uncomfortable one: they don’t really know.
The UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 reveals that 43% of UK businesses experienced a cyber security breach or attack in the past year, yet only 29% of businesses have conducted a formal cyber risk assessment, and just 30% have a documented incident management plan.
The consequences of this gap between threat and preparedness are significant, with research revealing that 75% of businesses without a continuity plan fail within three years of a major disaster. For businesses relying on cloud infrastructure, private servers, or hybrid environments, an IT disaster recovery plan is essential.
As a managed IT support provider in Manchester, Cloud Geeni helps businesses design and implement disaster recovery strategies that protect operations, data, and reputation when the unexpected happens.
What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?
A disaster recovery plan is a documented set of procedures and strategies for recovering critical systems and infrastructure following a disruptive event. Its primary objective is to minimise downtime, maintain business continuity, and restore services to an acceptable level within predefined timeframes.
Two key metrics define recovery goals:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines the maximum acceptable downtime. If your RTO is four hours, your systems must be operational again within that window.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) determines the acceptable amount of data loss. An RPO of one hour means you could lose up to one hour’s worth of data during recovery.
A well-defined disaster recovery plan includes thorough risk assessments, business impact analysis, and a clearly defined hierarchy of recovery priorities. For organisations using cloud managed services, this planning becomes even more critical as workloads span multiple environments.
The Disasters Your Business Needs to Prepare For
Understanding the types of disasters that can occur is the first step toward effective preparedness. The threat landscape has evolved considerably, and the last few years have demonstrated just how damaging these incidents can be.
Ransomware and Cyber-Attacks
Ransomware attacks against UK businesses doubled from less than 0.5% in 2024 to 1% in 2025, translating to approximately 19,000 organisations affected. The financial and operational impact can be devastating.
In June 2024, a ransomware attack on Synnovis, a pathology supplier to several major NHS trusts, led to thousands of cancelled appointments and surgeries. The attackers published nearly 400GB of stolen data, including patient names, NHS numbers, and blood test results. The incident demonstrates how a single attack on a supplier can cascade across an entire healthcare network.
According to a Sohos report, 37% of companies took up to a week to fully recover from a ransomware attack, while 28% needed up to 1 month and 16% needed 1 to 3 months.
AI-Powered Threats: The New Frontier
Artificial intelligence has transformed the cyber threat landscape in ways that demand attention from every business. A 2024 report from the National Cyber Security Centre declared that all types of cyber threat actor were already using AI, albeit to varying degrees.
Deepfake technology has become particularly concerning. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, there were 179 recorded deepfake incidents, surpassing the total for all of 2024. Criminals are using AI-generated audio and video to impersonate executives, with one notable incident at engineering firm Arup resulting in HK£200 million worth of fraudulent payments after staff were deceived by a video conference featuring a deepfaked senior manager.
Your disaster recovery plan must account for these sophisticated threats. This means verifying communications through established protocols, training staff to recognise AI-generated content, and ensuring recovery procedures can address attacks that may have been in your systems undetected for months.
Infrastructure and Human Failures
Not every disaster comes from external attackers. Research indicates that software failures cause 53% of unplanned downtime, followed by network outages at 50% and human error at 45%. Hardware failures account for 38% of incidents.
A 2025 survey found that 72% of senior IT decision-makers reported significant IT downtime or disruption during the past year. Yet only 31% expressed confidence in their disaster recovery and business continuity plans. The gap between experience and preparedness is a warning that planning alone is insufficient without regular testing and validation.
Natural Disasters and Power Failures
Physical threats remain relevant. The 2021 OVHCloud data centre fire left many businesses unable to access their data, demonstrating how a single physical incident can affect thousands of organisations.
For businesses in Manchester and across the North West, ensuring your data is replicated across geographically diverse UK data centres provides protection against localised disasters while maintaining the performance benefits of UK-hosted infrastructure.
What Should Be Included in Your Disaster Recovery Plan?
An effective disaster recovery plan covers several essential elements that work together to protect your business.
Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis
Start by identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities specific to your environment. A business impact analysis helps prioritise critical systems and applications based on their importance to your operations.
Data Backup and Replication
Regular backups ensure the availability and integrity of critical data. However, modern ransomware specifically targets backup systems: 96% of attacks now attempt to compromise backup repositories alongside primary systems. This makes immutable backups and air-gapped storage essential components of your strategy.
Replication, whether synchronous or asynchronous, enables near-real-time duplication of data to alternate locations. The choice between these approaches depends on your RPO requirements and the criticality of your data.
Redundancy and High Availability
Integrating redundancy measures into your cloud infrastructure minimises downtime. This includes redundant servers, load balancing, failover clusters, and redundant network connectivity to distribute workloads and eliminate single points of failure. For private cloud environments, these measures are critical to maintaining the uptime your business depends on.
Testing and Validation
A disaster recovery plan that hasn’t been tested is a plan that may fail when you need it most. Alarmingly, 31% of organisations have not updated their disaster recovery plans in over a year. Regular testing through simulated scenarios, backup recovery drills, and data integrity checks identifies weaknesses before a real incident exposes them. Testing should be rigorous enough to challenge your assumptions about recovery capabilities.
Communication and Documentation
Clear communication channels and defined roles are crucial during a disaster. Your plan should include up-to-date contact lists, escalation procedures, and protocols for informing stakeholders, customers, and regulatory bodies. Well-documented procedures should be accessible even when primary systems are unavailable.
The Role of Your IT Support Provider in Disaster Recovery
A managed IT support provider plays a significant role in ensuring your disaster recovery capabilities remain robust and current.
This partnership typically encompasses developing comprehensive recovery plans tailored to your specific cloud environment, implementing and managing backup and replication solutions, defining appropriate RTOs and RPOs for different systems, conducting regular testing and validation exercises, monitoring infrastructure and recovery systems for potential issues, and coordinating recovery efforts when incidents occur.
With managed cyber security services, your provider also brings proactive threat monitoring and incident response capabilities that complement your disaster recovery planning.
Post-Disaster: Recovery and Learning
Recovery doesn’t end when systems come back online. Post-disaster management determines how effectively you return to normal operations and how well you prevent future incidents.
This phase involves validating that all systems and data have been fully restored, testing functionality, ensuring security protocols are in place, and communicating with stakeholders about the recovery process. A thorough debrief identifies what worked, what didn’t, and what improvements should be made to the plan.
Your disaster recovery plan should be treated as a living document that evolves with your business, the threat landscape, and lessons learnt from both testing and actual incidents.
Protect Your Business with Proactive IT Services in Manchester
With cyber threats increasing in sophistication and frequency, the question isn’t whether your business will face a disruptive incident, but when. The organisations that recover quickly are those with tested disaster recovery plans and trusted IT support in Manchester.
Cloud Geeni provides IT services in Manchester and across the North West, combining UK-hosted private cloud infrastructure with proactive support and cyber security expertise. Whether you need to develop a disaster recovery strategy from scratch or want to validate your existing plans, our team can help you build resilience into your IT environment. Book a consultation to discuss your disaster recovery requirements and discover how we can help protect your business.
