RTO and RPO in DRAAS. Now, that’s a lot of acronyms, even for IT. RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective. RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective. DRAAS stands for disaster-recovery-as-a-service.
Disaster-recovery-as-a-service is the replication of your network by a third-party to provide failover and data recovery in the event of a disaster.
When considering your disaster recovery solution, RTO and RPO are key metrics, both measured in time.
RTO is how quickly you need to have your team back up and working on your network. If a disaster strikes at 9AM and your RTO is three hours, your team will be back on-line at noon. Does your business need to recover this quickly? Perhaps, perhaps not. It depends on the business. Generally, the shorter the RTO, the greater the investment required.
RPO is how far back you’re willing to lose data. So, if your business is backing up its data every three hours, your RTO is three hours. This means that no matter when a disaster occurs, should you lose all un-replicated data, the most data you’ll lose is the last three hours worth. Again, how long your RPO needs to be depends on the business. And again, shorter RPOs generally require greater investment.
It’s an important step to define your RTO and RPO and set-up the systems to support that. However, these metrics don’t mean much unless you’re actively testing your solution and making sure data back-up and system failover solutions are working. Regular testing is KEY!