Organizations can’t afford downtime when dealing with customers on a real-time basis. That being said, a number of incidents can cause a business to hit pause – a ransomware attack, a power outage, or simple human mistakes. No one can predict when this can happen, and that’s why businesses need to be prepared with disaster recovery solutions that have been tried and tested.
Understanding RTO and RPO
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are two of the most important parameters of a disaster recovery plan. These two objectives guide enterprises to choose optimal data backup plans or backup and disaster recovery services from MSPs.
- RTO – How Long to Recover?
Recovery time objective refers to the amount of time an application or applications can be down before causing severe loss to the organization. The amount of time depends from application to application – low priority applications can be down for a significant amount of time, whereas high priority applications that directly impact employees and customers would have to be recovered quickly.
- RPO – How Far Back to Recover?
When downtime occurs, organizations need to ask themselves – how much data can they afford to lose? Essentially, recovery point objectives refer to your organization’s total loss tolerance, i.e., the amount of data that can be lost or forgotten before significant harm to the business and customer occurs. It is expressed as a time measurement from the loss event to the most recent preceding backup.
Importance Of RPO And RTO For Business Continuity
Maintaining continuity in business is more about preparation and less about guessing. Business continuity and disaster recovery solutions are things that organizations must have in place. An organization must find the right balance between investing the number of resources in recovery and having a foolproof recovery plan. To achieve this balance, RPO and RTO are paramount in driving back-up and recovery of applications. Without determining them properly, you would just be guessing – and guessing isn’t the best way to run a business.
Is your business prepared for data loss? From experience, we can say that taking a chance is not worth the risk. Disaster recovery is complex, and many organizations may not have the right plan or resources to manage it. Therefore, it makes sense to outsource it to a provider who can offer backup and disaster recovery services. Disaster recovery solutions and services are just one part of a complete cloud and IT infrastructure solution.
Contact Pathway Communications to eliminate downtime and data loss and ensure business continuity.
