DISASTER RECOVERY: WHAT ARE RPO AND RTO
In the last post we introduced the topic of Disaster Recovery, an essential solution to protect companies from unpredictable incidents, as natural disaster, human errors, thefts, hacker attacks. Today we will see better how a Disaster Recovery solution works and what are RPO and RTO, two important parameters to assure the service’s efficiency and the system recovery.
First of all, how does a Disaster Recovery solution work?
Companies, especially online firms (but not only them!), safeguard a precious treasure: data. Once you lose all the information, if you don’t have the chance to recover them, you could take high risks and close the doors of your business very soon.
As well as data loss, the interruption of operations could cause huge money losses and could destabilize the business in the eyes of its customers. Imagine an e-commerce website: what will happen if the site was not online for a length of time? Users will immediately abandon the shop and, unless they are very loyal clients, they will rarely come back to complete any purchase. Therefore, in addition to the impact on the revenues, there are long-term negative consequences.
To avoid these problems you can implement a Disaster Recovery solution, customized according to the needs of your business and that includes specific RPO and RTO, concepts we’re going to talk about in a few lines.
Implementing a Disaster Recovery means performing a replication of business systems and data on another site, in short copying the informative system on another physical or virtual machine, that will intervene in case of a possible disaster, ensuring the continuity of operating activities and the recovery of data, systems and applications.
One of the basic personalization of Disaster Recovery is the definition of precise RPO and RTO. As mentioned above, they are two essential parameters for the DR effectiveness and the incompleteness of these parameters could extend the disaster impact. Once you define these metrics, you can choose the better solution of Disaster Recovery for your business.
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective): how much data can I afford to lose?
RPO is the metric indicating the time which passes between the last replication and the happening of the disaster. Obviously, is linked to the replication frequency of systems, more frequent means fewer data lost. - RTO (Recovery Time Objective): how much is the time requested to go back online?
Instead, the concept of RTO refers to the time which passes between the disaster and the complete recovery of systems. For instance, if I cannot afford even a minute of downtime, my RTO will be zero.
According to the value attributed to these parameters it will be chosen a particular Disaster Recovery solution so as to respect the timing and objectives defined in the action plan.
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