Continuity · the Caribbean
Continuity planning where the weather is part of the threat model
In most of the world, disaster recovery is a compliance exercise. In the Caribbean and South Florida it is an operational one, on a schedule, every year between June and November.
Two numbers decide your architecture
RPO — recovery point objective — is how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. RTO — recovery time objective — is how long you can afford to be down. Agree both with the business before choosing any technology.
They are not technical preferences; they are commercial decisions with a price attached. An RPO of 24 hours means a nightly backup. An RPO of minutes means continuous replication and costs accordingly. Most organisations discover, mid-incident, that nobody ever wrote these numbers down.
Write them down first. Everything else follows from them.
Far enough to be safe, close enough to be useful
A backup in the same building as the production system is not a backup; it is a second copy sharing one fate. The same applies to a backup in the same flood plain, on the same power grid, or in the path of the same storm.
But distance has a cost. Push the recovery site far enough away and latency, bandwidth and the practical logistics of getting a person to the equipment all get worse. The useful position is a separate risk zone that is still operationally reachable.
Nassau sits about 180 miles from Miami: a different country, a different power grid, a different regulatory system and a different storm track — while remaining a short flight and a low-latency network hop from South Florida. For a Florida business, that combination is difficult to reproduce domestically.
What a continuity plan needs beyond storage
Copying data offsite is the part everyone does. The parts that decide whether you actually recover:
- Tested restores. An untested backup is a hypothesis. Restore something real, on a schedule, and time it against your RTO.
- Versioning. Ransomware and human error both corrupt the current version. Point-in-time recovery is what saves you, not a mirror of a damaged file.
- Documents that are not files. Signed originals, deeds, certificates and archives do not have a cloud version. They need physical custody.
- Somewhere for people to work. If the office is unreachable, staff and systems both need a destination.
- A contact who answers. During a regional event, a ticket queue in another time zone is not an escalation path.
One facility, three of those problems
Secure Shore operates what is, as far as we know, the only facility in The Bahamas that combines three things at one address: data center colocation and cloud infrastructure, certified physical document storage, and fully equipped backup office space.
That combination is unusual because those three services are normally bought from three different suppliers with three different contracts and three different sets of access procedures — which is fine until the day you need all three at once, which is precisely the day they are hardest to coordinate.
The building is purpose-built for disaster recovery: reinforced concrete, fully redundant power, multiple independent network connections, 24/7 physical security, backed by a 99.9% uptime SLA. It has been privately owned and operated by Secure Shore since 2015. See the facility in detail.
Common questions
How often should backups run?
As often as your agreed RPO requires, and no more. If the business can tolerate losing a day of work, nightly is correct and anything more frequent is spending money on a requirement nobody has. If it cannot, that decision needs to be made and funded before an incident, not during one.
Is cloud storage the same as a disaster recovery plan?
No. Cloud storage is one component. A plan also covers who declares an incident, in what order systems come back, where people physically go, how customers are told, and how you verify the restore actually worked. The storage is the easy part.
Why not just back up to another US region?
You can, and for many organisations that is sufficient. It becomes insufficient when the risk you are managing is not physical but jurisdictional or provider-level — a single provider account compromise, or a legal process reaching your primary and your backup at once, because both sit with the same company under the same legal system.
Do you provide physical document storage as well?
Yes — certified document storage operates from the same facility, alongside backup office space. It is the reason the site is described as a three-in-one operation.
Start with the copy, then build the plan
Automatic backup with versioning, encrypted at rest, stored in our own Nassau facility. Free to start, and a Bahamian phone number that reaches a person.