Recovering From Network Downtime -- RPO and RTO, Two Acronyms to Know

At some point, nearly every business will experience a network interruption. Whether caused by a natural disaster, hacker, or human error without a plan already in place, recovery will take longer than it should.

Do you know what to do if the systems you run your business on suddenly become unavailable?

The first step is to list all of your systems -- hardware and software, services, and vendors. This list, obviously, needs to accessible should your system crash. Having a hard copy and/or a copy backed up in the cloud is a very, very good idea.

Then you need to prioritize what systems need to be online quickly to minimize losses.

This is where the two acronyms come in:

• RPO (recovery point objective) -- the time between the last time data was saved and when data loss occurs. This relates to how frequently you backup your data.
• RTO (recovery time objective) -- the maximum amount of time a business can tolerate an IT service/function not working.

Even large companies with massive budgets have to prioritize. It’s not cost-effective to place a high priority on a service that isn’t critical. Having everything as “high priority” can drive the cost of disaster recovery through the roof.

As you create RPOs and RTOs, you’ll gain a better understanding of your critical business systems.

Businesses should also review their objectives regularly. As business priorities shift, so with recovery objectives.

Outsource or In-House?

The core of disaster recovery is a solid data backup strategy. While simple in principle -- office data should be backed up on a set schedule (frequency dependent on the RPO) to redundant storage -- backing up data is something most SMBs struggle with.

Partnering with an IT managed services provider can alleviate this burden from internal IT staff. By not having to pay for the infrastructure to backup data and by bringing in a team of experts, you’re assured of effective backup at a lower cost than you can do it yourself.

Disaster recovery is about the ability to keep your business operation (or return it to operation as quickly as possible) in the event of any disruption -- from simple human error that crashes your network to a flood that prevents you from getting to your office.

Reduce the risk of downtime and identify your RPO and RTO.

Need help? Give us a call.