Part Two of our Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery series
This is Part Two of our Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery series. To read the full data backup and disaster recovery white paper, click here.
By now, you’ve heard of data backup. Since backed-up data is of little use if there is no system in place to use it, DR steps in to fill the gap.
Disaster recovery plans will be different for most every business, mainly in that most will have different tolerances for downtime and data loss. This level of tolerance is measured in two key metrics: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and (RPO) Recovery Point Objective:
• RPO is the time between each backup of a business’s data. It answers the question, “What is the most progress we can afford to lose?”
For example, if a company has a maximum RPO of 6 hours, that company would likely backup its systems four times per day. In the worst case scenario, the systems would fail right before a backup, leading to just under 6 hours of lost progress at most.
RTO describes how long a business can tolerate losing access to application, system, or computer. It answers the question, “How long can we go without a specific technology?”
For example, a busy e-commerce business might have a very low tolerance for losing its website, and would have an RTO of only seconds or minutes. The RPO for its email server, however, might be hours or days.
