Disaster Recovery Planning for Pittsburgh Businesses

Most outages aren't dramatic. A ransomware note appears on a Monday morning, a virtualization host dies mid-quarter-close, or a burst pipe takes out a server closet in Robinson. What separates a two-hour hiccup from a two-week crisis is whether your disaster recovery planning was built and tested before the incident, not scrambled together during it. This page walks through how PGH Networks designs, documents, and rehearses recovery plans for small and mid-market organizations across the Pittsburgh metro so you know exactly what happens next when something goes wrong.

Our process is deliberately sequential. We don't sell a backup product and call it a plan. We start with the business, translate that into technical recovery targets, then build the runbooks and infrastructure that make those targets real.

A backup is a file. A disaster recovery plan is a decision tree, a set of tested runbooks, and the people who know how to execute them under pressure.

Step 1: Business impact analysis and risk assessment

Before we touch a backup appliance or a cloud console, we sit down with your leadership and department heads to identify which systems actually run the business and what it costs when they're down. A manufacturer in Cranberry has very different priorities than a healthcare practice in Monroeville or a professional services firm downtown. This step produces the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for each critical workload, along with a threat model that reflects your real exposure: ransomware, hardware failure, insider error, cloud provider outage, regional weather events, and supply chain compromise.

Typical deliverables from this step include:

• A ranked inventory of business-critical applications and data
• RTO and RPO targets agreed with the business, not assumed by IT
• A risk register mapped to likelihood and financial impact

Step 2: Recovery architecture design

With targets in hand, we design the recovery architecture that meets them at a defensible cost. That usually means a layered approach: immutable local backups for fast restores, geographically separated cloud replicas for site loss, and image-level or replication-based protection for the systems where a four-hour RTO isn't optional. We build for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace data too, since native retention is not a backup. Where compliance frameworks apply (HIPAA, CMMC, SOC 2, PCI DSS), the architecture is designed to satisfy the specific control language auditors will ask about, not just the spirit of it.

TL;DR: We architect recovery to hit named RTO and RPO numbers you can defend to your board, your insurer, and your auditor.

We give particular attention to ransomware-resilient design: immutability, out-of-band credentials, isolated recovery environments, and the ability to restore to clean infrastructure rather than back into a compromised network. This is the layer generic backup vendors tend to gloss over, and it's the layer that determines whether you pay a ransom or restore from your own systems.

Step 3: Runbook development and documentation

A recovery plan that lives in one engineer's head is not a plan. In this step we produce written runbooks that a competent technician can execute under stress: who declares an incident, who has authority to failover, in what order systems come back, how DNS and identity are handled, how users are communicated with, and how you know the recovery is actually complete. We document dependencies explicitly, because the reason recoveries stall is almost always an undocumented dependency (a license server, a certificate, an on-prem domain controller a SaaS app quietly relies on).

Documentation also covers the human side: contact trees, vendor escalation paths, cyber-insurance notification requirements, and legal or regulatory reporting obligations. If you're a defense contractor working toward CMMC, or a healthcare organization under HIPAA, these obligations have hard clocks attached.

Step 4: Testing, tabletop exercises, and validation

An untested plan is a hypothesis. We run scheduled recovery tests against real workloads and facilitate tabletop exercises with your leadership team so the decision-makers have practiced the decisions before they have to make them for real. Tests generate evidence: screenshots, timings, gaps, and remediation items. That evidence is what insurers and auditors increasingly require, and it's what tells you whether your stated RTO is a number on a spreadsheet or a number you can actually hit.

• Quarterly or semiannual restore tests of tiered workloads
• Annual full-scenario tabletop with executive participation
• Written after-action reports with tracked remediation

Step 5: Ongoing management and plan maintenance

Environments drift. Applications get added, vendors change, staff turn over, and a plan written eighteen months ago quietly stops matching reality. As part of our managed DR service, we treat the plan as a living document: monitoring backup health daily, reviewing the plan on a defined cadence, updating it when material changes happen, and re-running tests whenever architecture shifts. This is the difference between disaster recovery planning as a project and DR as an operational discipline.

Next steps

If you already have a backup product but no documented plan, or a plan that hasn't been tested in the last year, that's a common starting point. We can assess what you have, identify the gaps that matter, and propose a path forward that fits your budget and risk tolerance.

Why PGH Networks

We're a Pittsburgh-based managed services provider working with clients across Allegheny, Butler, Washington, Westmoreland, and Beaver counties, from downtown to Cranberry, Monroeville, Robinson, Wexford, Southpointe, and the Strip District. Our engineers hold vendor certifications across Microsoft, VMware, Veeam, and major cloud platforms, and our practice covers the compliance frameworks Pittsburgh-area buyers actually face: HIPAA for regional healthcare, CMMC for the defense manufacturing base, SOC 2 for SaaS and professional services, and PCI DSS for retail and hospitality.

Where we differ from a lot of local providers: we pair traditional infrastructure recovery work with an active AI enablement practice, which matters more than it sounds. AI copilots and custom applications are increasingly wired into business-critical workflows, and they need to be inside your recovery scope, not outside it. We plan for that from day one.

Get a tailored proposal

Every environment is different, and a credible recovery plan starts with understanding yours. We'll scope a business impact analysis, review your current backup and continuity posture, and return a written proposal with clear RTO/RPO targets, architecture, and pricing. No pressure and no boilerplate.

Request your disaster recovery proposal

Frequently asked questions

How is disaster recovery planning different from backup?

Backup is one component. Disaster recovery planning covers the full sequence of detecting, declaring, and executing a recovery: which systems come back in what order, who has authority to act, how you validate recovery, and how you communicate through the incident. Without that wrapper, backups often exist but recoveries still fail.

What RTO and RPO can we realistically achieve?

It depends on the workload and your budget. Non-critical file shares may be fine with a 24-hour RPO and next-day RTO, while an ERP or EHR system may need sub-hour targets that require replication and standby infrastructure. We set targets per workload rather than applying a single number across the environment.

Do you support Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace recovery?

Yes. Native retention in both platforms is not a backup and won't protect you from ransomware, malicious deletion, or admin error beyond short recovery windows. We deploy third-party protection for mail, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and Google Drive as part of the DR scope.

Can you help us meet HIPAA, CMMC, or SOC 2 requirements for contingency planning?

Yes. Each of those frameworks has specific language around contingency planning, backup, and recovery testing. We map the plan and its evidence artifacts to the relevant controls so audits go smoothly and remediation findings are minimized.

How often should a DR plan be tested?

At minimum annually with a full tabletop, and quarterly or semiannually for technical restore tests on tiered workloads. Any material change to the environment (new critical application, cloud migration, M&A activity) should also trigger a plan review and targeted test.