The constantly evolving cybersecurity and general IT landscapes have encouraged businesses to develop better continuity and disaster recovery initiatives. When these programs are properly planned, designed and launched, organizations can improve their long-term resiliency and reduce the risk of not being able to function in an increasingly competitive marketplace simply due to unavailable resources and inefficient operations.
Every business continuity plan is different, though there are generally three metrics that any functional initiative should be built around.
Recovery time objective
The RTO is generally understood to be how long a company can go without its operations crumbling due to the inability to access mission-critical resources and complete time-sensitive tasks. In other words, it is the amount of time within which critical business processes must be restored. Depending on the organization, the RTO can be measured in minutes, hours or even days, though the fast-paced nature of today’s corporate environment is forcing decision-makers to have increasingly small RTOs.
Recovery point objective
Similar to RTO, RPO is the amount of information that can be lost before a firm begins to experience consequences. In many cases, RPO includes mission-critical data and applications that are needed for employees to operate efficiently in the wake of an emergency. As the big data movement becomes more significant in the business world, decision-makers must be sure to understand how much information they aggregate and use per minute or per day if they want to remain productive in a post-disaster scenario.
Unlike RTO, RPO is not necessarily dependent on time. If a company loses a server for a few minutes, for example, it could sacrifice a massive amount of information that may have been generated in that downtime, which can have a serious long-term impact on operations.
Granularity
Finally, organizations that want to build a strong disaster recovery strategy must consider granularity, which suggests how storage architectures need to be structured. Granularity is defined as “the relative size, scale, level of detail, or depth of penetration that characterizes an object or activity,” and therefore gives greater context to the data being protected by specified RTOs and RPOs. This metric includes different file levels and data protection requirements that are specific to a firm’s underlying success.
As businesses look to improve continuity and disaster recovery strategies, decision-makers must keep these three metrics in mind when launching an initiative, as losing sight of any of these objectives can cause companies to experience unnecessary complications if an emergency were to arise. By understanding these values, large enterprises and small companies alike can launch more rewarding long-term resiliency endeavors.