RPO & RTO: Customizing Your Recovery Plan
Make Sure You’re Backed Up
Have you ever been working on a Word Document, Large RFP, or PowerPoint Presentation all day, only to lose your work just before finishing? Maybe the electricity went out or your computer froze. Maybe you had to run to a meeting, tripped and slammed your laptop into the ground…Whatever the reason, we’ve all been there. Losing your work and your time spent is the worst…
Now imagine data loss on a larger scale. Instead of a document, RFP, or presentation, it’s a multimillion-dollar project or database. This is what it’s like when a company’s online systems are jeopardized. Your customer will miss important deadlines, their accounting department won’t be able to send out payments or invoices, and their production departments will come to a complete halt. Instead of losing half of a word document, they have lost half of their company’s vital online resources.
Every company is going down at some point, whether to ransomware, hardware failures, or a simple human error.
When your customer gets hit, questions will fly:
- How did we not have a Plan B?
- Who is responsible for getting us back up and running?
- What internal and external users are most impacted?
- Can they keep their operations running without their applications?
- How long until their operations recover?
- What applications are most vital to staying afloat?
- Will they need to backtrack or re-write anything?
Be Ready for the Worst
To help your customer protect their organization, we recommend taking a look at the applications they use most, first. Using these applications as a starting point will help you both understand the loss to their company’s operations if they go down. Understanding this risk will be key in determining two very important factors: their RTO and RPO. From there, you can form an appropriate plan of action.
RTO stands for recovery time objectives. It’s the amount of downtime your client can afford to be down before operations start to fail. For example: If their applications need to be operational within minutes in order to keep their business running, they have a short RTO. Their tolerance for data loss is low. They’ll have a harder time recovering if applications fail. A longer RTO, however, means they have some wiggle room with their options for the right recovery service. The faster the recovery requirement, the higher the cost and complexity.
RPO stands for recovery point objectives. It’s the point from which your client would like to recover their data. It determines how often data is replicated for recovery, or “backed up”. The frequency of backups does not typically drive up the cost to an organization. It does, however, add complexity. Make sure you understand how the frequency of backups can impact your client’s performance environment. Nobody likes to be interrupted.
Utilizing MRDaaS Solutions for your Client
When you have a business application conversation with your customer, you are helping them identify their biggest risks. You are also helping them form financially viable plans. Not everyone can afford a duplicate system with synchronous replication on standby, but everyone can afford to protect their vital applications with flexible MDRaaS solutions. By understanding what applications keep your client’s business running, you can personalize their package to their exact needs. This saves them money, keeps their data safe, and builds lasting relationships as their need for technology grows. Sky Data Vault is always happy to walk you through flexible solutions, whatever their RPO and RTO calls for.
Have a question about a complicated case? Give us a call. We’ll help you piece it together.