When you’re creating a disaster recovery strategy, there are two main criteria that you need to consider: your Restore Point Objectives (RPOs) and your Restore Time Objectives (RTOs). Although these acronyms sound complex, the idea behind them is fairly straightforward. Let’s have a closer look at how your RPOs and RTOs affect your DR strategies.
Determining RPOs
To better understand what your RPO is you should ask yourself “How much data can I afford to lose if a disaster occurs?” Your RPO represents the amount of data loss that your organization is able to sustain in the event of a disaster. This can vary between organizations as well as applications. Some businesses have zero tolerance for data loss, other, can tolerate a couple days’ worth of data loss and can therefore afford to have a much higher RPO.
Determining Your RTOs
Similarly, to understand what your RTO is you should ask yourself “How long can I can afford to be without service if a disaster occurs?” They might be able to work manually for days by temporarily substituting manual paper-based actions for their normal computerized operations? It’s up to you
Building Your DR Strategy
The DR strategy you build, needs to consider the organization’s and applications’ RPOs and RTOs. The right answer for RPOs and RTOs depends on the nature of the business, the workload, and its value to the business. As you can imagine, solutions that provide low RPOs and RTOs are also typically much more costly than solutions with that allow for higher RPOs and RTOS.
In some ways, the DR strategy for a smaller business is even more important than for an enterprise. While a larger organization might be able to sustain a significant outage and pick back up again, a lengthy outage for a smaller organization might put it out of business permanently. Basing your DR strategy on your businesses RPOs and RTOs ensures that you can be up and running after a disaster with a minimum of cost.
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