Optimizing RTO's and RPO's

In the unfortunate event of a disaster, whether it be a technological failure, user error, or an actual disaster, it is critical to look at your RTO and RPO. RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective, while RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective. RTO indicates how much time you have before the damaged systems need to be back up, running, and functional. If your company sets its recovery time objective at 8 hours, for example, and when disaster strikes it only takes 4 hours for systems to be back up and running, the RTO would be met. Recovery time objectives can vary from enterprise to enterprise. While some can withstand an outage lasting a week, others need to be operational within the hour. How critical it is for a network to be up and running again will determine the length of the RTO.  Recovery point objective on the other hand is similar to insurance. RPO is how much data in a certain amount of time, a company is willing to lose in the event of a disaster. Say the recovery point objective is 1 hour worth of data. If the disaster caused the primary system to fail and the standby database took 10 minutes to recover and update the information, then the RPO was met. The lower the objectives, the more minimized critical data loss and financial impact on the company.

RTO’s and RPO’s are crucial when creating a disaster recovery plan and thinking about business continuity. Before an organization sets its RTO’s and RPO’s, they have to calculate a cost analysis to see how much they can afford to lose in time and data. When those objectives are set for the overall infrastructure, the business’ decision makers can then prioritize mission-critical operations. The impact of RTO’s and RPO’s is that it is about money and data. How much money and data is going to be lost in the scenario of a disaster and its resulting downtime? Disaster recovery planning is essentially trying to create the lowest cost solution with the least amount of impact to the organization and users. Along with a business impact analysis, these two factors help create a basis for finding and analyzing potential strategies in a business continuity plan. Being the groundwork for a solid DR plan, tight RTO’s and RPO’s are more expensive and require rigorous backups and disaster recovery actions.

How Rackware Can Help?

At Rackware, we offer multiple RTO/RPO options. Depending on your business needs, you can choose to prioritize high availability or cost savings. After prioritizing applications, you can enable those to recover primarily. The secondary, less critical applications will follow in a cost effective time frame. Pre-provisioned resources are initiated within minutes, ensuring a timely RTO. Rackware’s solution also an auto recovery fallback that promises that applications will return to the primary data center for optimal performance. Rackware’s cloud infrastructure backs up into a cloud image. As these cloud images are “bootable”, they are ready to take over workload when servers are down, reducing recovery times immensely. The entirety of your companies backup and recovery process can be automated such that you gain granular control over your RPO and RTO. Rackware Management Module enables the user to balance and optimize between RPO, RTO, backup, DR, and recovery costs. This service that is able to balance function and cost is available to both internal and external clients. Improving the IT world as we know it, Rackware offers IT managers the power to manage control levels of automation, protection, and cost management.