Even the smallest of small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) have finally let go of their old-fashioned paper filing systems, and now store most of their data electronically. Many have become more advanced, using sophisticated applications and leveraging data in new ways to support business strategy. Of course, advanced use of technology and data requires more advanced data protection.
Even if you have implemented a data backup solution, you’ll lose a certain amount of data because of an outage, whether it’s caused by equipment failure, a major weather event, or a downed utility pole outside of your office. How much data can you afford to lose? How fast can your data be restored? What kind of impact will an outage have on your business?
By establishing recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), organizations provide concrete answers to these questions. The RPO is the maximum age of a file that needs to be restored in order to resume business operations. In other words, RPO tells you how much data loss will be tolerated. For example, if a certain type of data is backed up every night at 10 pm and that system crashes tomorrow at 1 pm, any data changed between 10 pm and 1 pm will be lost.
The RTO is the maximum period of time that an application, service or network can be unavailable after a failure occurs. Basically, the RTO tells you how much downtime and lost revenue your organization can tolerate. Of course, the impact of downtime isn’t just financial. A prolonged outage can affect the confidence of customers, business partners and vendors.
RPOs and RTOs help you determine how frequently backups should occur, what kind of backup infrastructure you need, and what your disaster recovery strategy should be. Generally speaking, as RPOs and RTOs become shorter, the risks associated with downtime and data loss are reduced.
There are several technologies organizations can use to meet the increased demand for faster RPOs and RTOs:
- A snapshot is a group of markers that point to stored data, creating a virtual copy of that data as it existed at a particular point in time. Unlike backups, snapshots can be performed while systems are online. They also provide faster data restore times.
- Recovery-in-place, or instant recovery, redirects the user workload to a backup server so data can be restored immediately on a backup virtual machine. When the data is recovered, the workload is shifted back to the original virtual machine.
- Replication is typically required when recovery-in-place doesn’t restore data quickly enough. This technique updates a secondary image on a separate storage platform, which is booted when a failure occurs so critical applications can be recovered almost instantly.
- Copy data management reduces storage consumption by saving just the primary data and a single backup. Additional virtual copies can be created on an as-needed basis using a snapshot mechanism without changing the primary or backup copy.
Without an advanced data protection infrastructure and strategy, downtime can potentially cripple an SMB. Let the experts at Verteks help you better understand these issues and technologies so you can implement a solution that minimizes the risk of downtime.
