Why Your Small Business Backups Belong with a Local Provider (Not a Tech Giant)
Offsite backups for small businesses shouldn't require a cloud engineering degree. Here's why a managed local provider beats DIY setups on AWS, Google, or Azure.
Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Report found ransomware in 88% of cyberattacks on small and mid-size businesses. Forty percent of those businesses lost data they could not recover. Sixty percent closed within six months.
We bring this up because the setup we see over and over with Gulf Coast business owners is the same one: QuickBooks on a desktop in the back office, project files scattered across a shared folder and somebody's laptop, customer records in a spreadsheet, and no plan for what happens if any of it disappears tomorrow. A hurricane, a break-in, a ransomware email that one of your employees clicks by accident. You lose years of records in an afternoon, and there is nothing on the other side of that except starting over.
Offsite backup means a copy of your business data is stored somewhere other than your office, encrypted and updated on a regular schedule, so that if anything goes wrong you can get it all back. We built our backup service for companies between 2 and 50 employees that don't have an IT person and don't want to become one.
Why the big cloud companies aren't built for businesses like yours
Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure are real, serious platforms. They are also built for large companies with full-time tech staff who spend their days managing servers and security settings. The setup process alone has enough options and configuration screens to make most people's eyes glaze over, and getting it wrong is easy. One wrong setting and your backup might not actually be protecting anything, or worse, it could be visible to anyone on the internet. A 2025 study found that nearly half of all Amazon cloud storage accounts had security settings configured incorrectly.
One contractor we work with in Gulfport had been paying for a Microsoft cloud backup for over a year before discovering that it had quietly stopped working in month two. No alert, no notification. He only found out when his hard drive died and there was nothing to recover. That kind of silent failure is common when nobody on staff understands the system well enough to monitor it.
What we do instead
We handle the whole thing so you don't have to learn a cloud platform or worry about whether it's set up right.
Your data gets encrypted (scrambled so nobody can read it without authorization) before it leaves your office and stays encrypted where we store it. That is standard for every client, not something you pay extra for. We keep our team small on purpose, because fewer people with access to your files means less risk. You can meet the person managing your backups, ask them questions, and actually get answers. When a client asks us where their data physically sits, we can point to the building. We can explain what happens to it if that building floods. On the Gulf Coast, that is a practical question, not a hypothetical one.
The part most people skip when they set up their own backup is testing whether it actually works. According to Sophos's 2025 survey, 43% of companies have no formal plan for recovering their data after an attack. A backup that has never been tested is really just a file sitting on a server somewhere that you hope works. We test ours on a regular schedule and confirm that everything comes back the way it should. If something is wrong, we find out during a routine check, not when your business is down and you're relying on it.
What happens when something goes wrong
The average downtime after a ransomware attack is 24 days. That includes big companies with dedicated tech teams. For a small business with no IT staff, it is longer.
If you're using Amazon or Google for your backup and something breaks, you open a support ticket online. You talk to a chatbot. Eventually you get connected with a support person who has never heard of your business, doesn't know what software you run, and needs you to explain everything from scratch while your operations are at a standstill.
When you call us, you reach the person who set your backup up. They already know what you're running, what data matters most, and what needs to come back first. The call is about getting your business back online, not about explaining your situation to a stranger.
We are not saying Amazon has bad support. They handle millions of accounts and they do it well at that scale. But that scale means a 15-person company in Hattiesburg is not going to get someone's full attention during an emergency. We will, because we don't operate at that scale and we don't want to.
Why cloud backup pricing is confusing
If you have ever tried to figure out what Amazon or Google would charge you for backup and given up after ten minutes on their pricing page, you're not alone. The pricing involves multiple storage tiers, data transfer fees, fees for downloading your own data (they call these "egress charges"), and a list of other line items that require a spreadsheet to model out. A Backblaze analysis found that download fees alone add 5 to 20% on top of the base price for businesses that actually need to access their backup files.
Those pricing pages exist for big companies with purchasing departments that negotiate contracts across dozens of services. A small business owner who wants to know what this costs per month is not the audience those pages were written for.
We charge a flat monthly rate based on how much data you have and how often we back it up. No download fees, no hidden charges, no surprises. You see the price before you sign and it stays the same unless your data volume changes.
How it works when you sign up
We start by looking at what you're running: your accounting software, point of sale system, project files, customer records, email, whatever your business depends on day to day. We figure out what needs to be backed up every day versus every week, and what is just taking up space. Not everything needs the same level of protection, and backing up things you don't need slows down recovery when it matters.
Within about two weeks, your backups are running and you get a plain-language summary of what is covered, where it's stored, and how long it would take to get everything back if you needed to. After that, we keep an eye on it, run regular recovery tests, and adjust when your setup changes. There is no long-term contract.
Get a free diagnostic where we review your current setup and tell you what is at risk. Or read more about our backup service.