Have you had the talk with your IT provider about RTO and RPO yet? If not, you should because it is an extremely important talk to have. Or perhaps find an IT provider that DOES regularly have that discussion with their clients.
So what IS RTO and RPO? Both have to do with disaster recovery and backups. RTO is recovery time objective, and RPO is recovery point objective. A discussion about those two should discover and set your – and your IT provider’s – expectations of what happens in a disaster. You need to know in advance what you can expect from your disaster recovery strategy.
RTO – recovery time objective – is the question about how long you will be down. Can you afford to be down a couple of days or more? Can you afford to be down a few hours? Do you need to be back up and running within minutes? No one can really answer those questions but YOU, but your IT provider needs to have that discussion with you so as to be able to implement the correct backup strategy.
For instance, if you can’t really be down for more than a couple of hours, what happens if your server dies and all you’ve got is a tape backup? Most likely, you’ll be waiting for days to get the replacement part or a replacement server, and then it may take hours or even a day or more to restore all of your data, the operating system, and everything else. On the other hand, if your IT provider knows in advance that you can’t be down for more than a couple of hours, there are backup technologies and strategies that will allow that to happen. There are even some that can have you back up and running within minutes.
If you’re backing up only over the Internet, it could take literally days or WEEKS to get all of your data back, depending on how much data there is and how fast your connection is. For some, that might be acceptable, but for others, it would be completely untenable.
RPO – recovery point objective – is the question about how much “data” can be lost. Initially, the response might be “none” but what is considered “data” is open to interpretation. What about your server operating system? Programs? What about workstations? RPO may affect RTO, since if you do not back up your entire systems, you may have to start reinstalling operating systems, programs, and backup software before even STARTING to restore the “data” that you’ve been protecting.
In addition, how often you back up your systems will have a huge bearing on how much data is lost. Even if you’re backing up EVERYTHING, if you’re doing it only once per day you may lose an entire day’s worth of work. If you’re manually taking disks or tapes offsite weekly, you could lose an entire week or more of data in case of a major disaster.
So what are YOUR expectations and needs? Have they potentially changed since you last had that discussion with your IT provider? Or has that conversation never even occurred? If not, it may be time to find an IT provider that will.
