Two metrics matter most regarding disaster recovery solutions: your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). The reason these two parameters are critical is directly related to the cost of downtime. Ninety-one percent of respondents to ITIC’s 2021 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey said a single hour of downtime that takes mission-critical server hardware and applications offline averages more than $1 million to $5 million due to lost business, productivity disruptions, and remediation efforts. The same survey found that 44 percent of enterprises surveyed said hourly downtime costs exceed $1 million to more than $5 million. And that’s excluding any legal fees, fines, or penalties.
What is RPO?
RPO sets the maximum amount of data your organization is willing to lose in the case of a data disaster. It is a core component of your business continuity and disaster recovery plan because it defines your minimum backup frequency schedule, limiting your data loss to the amount of time between backups. For example, if a ransomware attack strikes and you are backing up once a day, you'll have to go back at least one day to restore your data. Frequent backups enable shorter RPOs. Here are some basic RPO questions you need to answer as you develop your disaster recovery plan:
- How much data will we lose over a specific period of time if operations are disrupted?
- What is the cost of lost data, and what is the maximum amount of data our business can tolerate?
What is RTO?
RTO sets the maximum amount of time your organization can tolerate without access to your applications and systems after an outage. Also, a critical part of your disaster recovery plan, your RTO determines the length of time it will take to recover these vital resources. Here are some basic RTO questions to answer as you develop your disaster recovery plan:
- How much revenue are we projecting we’ll lose if a system is unavailable?
- Does the system handle customer data? If yes, what service-level agreements (SLAs) are in place that we must meet?
- What are each system’s dependencies? Would other systems be impacted? If so, are we able to meet the RTOs for those systems?
- What would the impacts be for lost and dissatisfied customers and employee productivity if customer-facing systems or applications are unavailable?
Business Continuity Cloud: Meeting Cloud and On-Premises RPOs and RTOs
Meeting your RPO and RTO can be critical to your business’s survival. That's why Arcserve has developed a new approach to backup and disaster recovery that makes it possible for you to instantly recover and meet your RPO and RTO and, of equal importance, your SLAs. Arcserve Business Continuity Cloud protects against IT outages across x86, cloud, physical, and virtual environments. It also works with whatever type of storage you use—public or private cloud, disk, or tape—and the applications you count on like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Office 365, Oracle Database, and more. Arcserve offers several options to meet your specific needs.
Arcserve Continuous Availability: Simple and Easy
Arcserve Continuous Availability eliminates the need for expensive replication tools and technologies for specific applications and systems. You can easily create systems and replicate data without making changes to your existing environment. And you can ensure high availability by continuously protecting applications and data on-premises, remote, or in the cloud, preventing downtime. Arcserve Continuous Availability continuously replicates data at the file system level of files/folders and applications and entire physical/virtual systems, with automatic failover to ensure your applications and systems remain operational without having to worry about RPO and RTO. You can simply roll back to the point immediately before a system crash, data corruption, or successful ransomware attack.
Arcserve UDP
Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) software gives you all-in-one data and ransomware protection, neutralizing ransomware attacks and letting you restore your data with effective, efficient disaster recovery. Safeguarded by Sophos Intercept X Advanced cybersecurity, Arcserve UDP combines deep-learning server protection, immutable storage, and scalable onsite and offsite business continuity. The result is a multi-layered approach that gives you complete IT resiliency for your virtual, physical, and cloud infrastructures so you can rest assured you can meet your RPO and RTO.
Arcserve UDP Cloud Hybrid: Cloud Economies for Backup and Disaster Recovery
With Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) Cloud Hybrid, you add cohesive data security, protection, and retention strategy. As the only direct-to-cloud backup as a service (BaaS) and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), you get comprehensive data protection with consumer-friendly usability. Arcserve UDP is scalable and flexible for always-on continuity while letting you quickly adapt to changing business needs by delivering industry-best RPOs and RTOs.
Take a Free Test Drive
If you’re facing challenging RPOs and RTOs, it’s time to take a closer look at Arcserve data protection solutions. Start your free trial today and see for yourself the difference Arcserve can make for your business.
