Companies need to establish specific goals for disaster recovery, including the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) to determine backup frequency and recovery technology. The RPO refers to the acceptable amount of potential data loss, while the RTO is the targeted amount of time to restore data. Companies must carefully weigh their critical information recovery needs against the costs of a proposed recovery system.
In today’s computer-driven economy, companies must respond to the danger of data loss and costly downtime associated with hardware and software malfunctions, equipment failure, acts of terrorism and natural disasters. As part of any business impact analysis, enterprise management should establish specific goals for disaster recovery, including the recovery point objective (RPO). The purpose of the recovery point is the lookback period to which data can be restored after a disaster and still allow the business to resume normal operations. In other words, RPO refers to the acceptable amount of potential data loss, in terms of time, that the business can tolerate. The purpose of the recovery point determines how often key corporate data is backed up and the technology involved in that process.
While it may seem prudent to keep all data backed up by the minute, the cost of doing so can be prohibitive, particularly if a business wants to store information off-site. Each company must carefully weigh its actual critical information recovery needs against the costs of a proposed recovery system. For example, banks and stock exchanges cannot tolerate any data loss, requiring an updated or updated “point of failure RPO”. A physician’s office has critical patient and financial data on its computer system, but can resume operations if the information is restored from the previous night’s backup, called a “close-deal RPO.” Finally, a teenager who plays games and surfs the Internet on his home computer may have a “Zero RPO,” which means he doesn’t have a serious need for backup.
In addition to the recovery point objective, a business continuity plan also contains a recovery time objective (RTO), a targeted amount of time from the point of failure to restore data. For example, a company may decide that it must resume normal activity within six hours of a disaster in order to minimize financial losses. The data recovery systems used by the company must provide a complete restoration of critical data within a six hour window. While RPO determines the backup frequency, RTO determines the recovery technology. Various backup and recovery modalities of tapes, disks, external hard drives, online storage, and alternate physical sites connected by telecommunication systems provide varying degrees of accessibility, security, and recovery rate.
Several key factors go into determining a recovery point objective. First, enterprise management must segregate information that is absolutely essential for basic operations to reduce data replication and storage costs. If a company wants to replicate and store all data, including non-critical data, it may need to reduce the frequency of replication to contain costs. For continuous recovery systems, the reliability of replicated data during a long-term disaster cannot be guaranteed. If the enterprise wants regional protection, with offsite storage, the maintenance costs of dark fiber technology, dense wave division multiplexer (DWDM) technology, or telecommunications lines will require longer RPOs.
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