The RPO/RTO, along with a business impact analysis, provides the basis for identifying and analyzing viable strategies for inclusion in the business continuity plan. Viable strategy options include any which would enable resumption of a business process in a time frame at or near the RPO/RTO.
At first glance these two terms appear to be quite similar. The best way to understand the difference between them is to associate the “RP” in “RPO” by imagining that they stand for “Rewrite Parameters” and the “RT” in “RTO” as “Real Time.”
RPO: Recovery Point Objective
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) describes the interval of time that might pass during a disruption before the quantity of data lost during that period exceeds the Business Continuity Plan’s maximum allowable threshold or “tolerance.”
Example: If the last available good copy of data upon an outage is from 18 hours ago, and the RPO for this business is 20 hours then we are still within the parameters of the Business Continuity Plan’s RPO. In other words it the answers the question – “Up to what point in time could the Business Process’s recovery proceed tolerably given the volume of data lost during that interval?”
RTO: Recovery Time Objective
The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in continuity. In other words, the RTO is the answer to the question: “How much time did it take to recover after notification of business process disruption?“
RPO designates the variable amount of data that will be lost or will have to be re-entered during network downtime. RTO designates the amount of “real time” that can pass before the disruption begins to seriously and unacceptably impede the flow of normal business operations.
There is always a gap between the actuals (RTA/RPA) and objectives introduced by various manual and automated steps to bring the business application up. These actuals can only be exposed by disaster and business disruption rehearsals.
Let’s take your backup and disaster recovery plan to the next level
Traditionally, businesses have cobbled together multiple software solutions to address disaster recovery (DR), backup, and archival as part of a broader data-protection practice. Today, the public cloud’s reliability, security, and scalability have the transformational potential to move different workloads to a single cloud platform for higher efficiency and agility.
Backup and Restore
- Simple, secure, and scalable data protection without the need for expensive on-site hardware and administrative overhead
- The OPEX model (versus CAPEX) enables enterprises to pay only for what is used, resulting in 60% lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
- Reliable, fast, and cost-effective data recovery is enabled by an enterprise-grade multi-region public cloud infrastructure, providing 99.99999% data durability.
- Your data is fully encrypted in transit and at rest with no vendor access to your data.
Disaster Recovery (DR)
- Eliminate the need for organizations to store complete copies of production systems at a data center that is managed by a secondary company. DR is available on demand in the cloud.
- Once in the cloud, workloads can be spread across geographies for easy replication and at-the-ready DR.
- With server environments replicated off-site, system downtime (and its resulting impact on productivity) can be reduced to near-zero. and redundancy.
- Cloud-based systems enable enterprises to store replicated virtual machines (VMs) to multiple different storage regions for even greater protection and redundancy.
Archival
- Efficient data management and storage combined with the best-of-breed deduplication technology allows for cost-effective long-term data retention.
- The auto-tiered storage model removes manual intervention, streamlines the archival process, and eliminates reliance on error-prone tape workflows.
- Immediate cloud access to hot, warm, and cold data simplifies recovery management and enables secure data mining for legal and compliance requests.
Test and Development
- Replicated test/dev systems can be instantly spun-up as needed, on demand, and with no dedicated hardware or software required, providing greater flexibility and speed.
- By leveraging a copy of a VM in the cloud, tests and validation can be run against a copy of the production data without affecting critical production environments.
- A single replicated VM can be centrally managed and replicated as often as needed, even across geographies, so test/dev can be easily managed around the clock.
- You can repurpose available VMs, so there is no need for separate test/dev systems.
Data Analytics
- Analyze backed-up data to understand risks and challenges around dormant data, storage growth, and data classification
- A cloud storage model can increase visibility into existing data which can then be better leveraged for additional business value, within a content analysis dashboard that can provide proactive alerts for potential risks. Converged Architecture
- It is a single data source, so you can eliminate redundancies and save on resources that you would otherwise spend to move data across systems.
- Organizations can turn services on and off on-demand by leveraging an existing public cloud account such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Azure.
- You can converge multiple workloads into a “single pane of glass” while gaining the assurance that your data, which is stored on the public cloud infrastructure, adhere to global data privacy regulations.
Our offer can gain all above business benefits when you choose a unified solution for moving backup and DR to the cloud as part of a broader cloud-migration strategy.