BUSINESS CONTINUITY DISASTER RECOVERY(BC/DR)BY RTO/RPO NUMBERS Used For Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

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Disaster recovery is slowly becoming the most talked about topic in business. In today’s market, disaster recovery services are the most efficient, cost-effective and readily available. However, understanding the whereabouts of it is not that easy and will require time and patience but guess what, we’ve got both of it; so in this article we’ll be explaining to you everything about disaster recovery and business continuity and what is the role of RTO and RPO numbers in it.

What is disaster recovery?

In the IT business, disaster is said to be the time when the service completely stops or has been compromised. On the other hand, disaster recovery is said to be the process of doing damage repair of this disaster and calling for help. Getting software and advanced tools that can be of help to get the service back on time is disaster recovery all about. When we speak of business, a DR plan helps to recover from the disaster with 100% data back and doesn’t let the efficiency of the service be compromised.

What is business continuity vs disaster recovery?

Every time you’ll see talks about disaster recovery software or tools, you’ll notice the mentions of business continuity and disaster recovery and we proceed any further in the discussion; let’s first clarify that DR and BC are not the same thing and are actually different.

Business continuity is something that will keep your business or work going by coming to the rescue when you meet a disaster. There are evidently more chances for a business to plan after meeting a disaster if they don’t have any business continuity plan. And what does disaster recovery do? It keeps backup for the hardware, software and apps, and that cannot be done without a business continuity plan because without it, there’s no point recovering those stuff. A business continuity plan will include your personnel, emergency, and financial data plans to keep the service going.

So, is there really a fight between DR and BC?

The answer is a clear cut NO. And the reason you all must know by now is that both DR and BC run hand in hand. Without a business continuity plan, there’s no point using a DR plan. It’s important for both of them to run together to keep the service going with all the files on the system backed up. DR acts like a source engine for the service and is necessary for the smooth running of the software but not the application, which needs to be kept in mind.

What are RTO and RPO?

Have you ever heard of Draas solutions? Well, it stands for disaster recovery as a service. It is a group of processes that you can seek from a 3rd party service provider for the business to develop and execute disaster recovery plans. Draas solutions always include RTO and RPO to get the recovery smoothly.

RTO:-

RTO stands for recovery time objective, which refers to the duration of time within which any business service must be restored after meeting a disaster to avoid break or stoppage in the continuity. RTO implies the real-time which can pass before the serious disruption of the business continues to happen.

RPO:-

RPO stands for the recovery point objective. As the name suggests, it refers to the gap in time that must have been passed between the point disaster happened till the business continuity plan is executed or the amount of data lost before the business continuity plan reaches its maximum saturation point.

What are some common types of backups

Traditional backup:-

Traditional backup is the RPO determining the frequency of backup, whether once a day or once a week or once a month, and so on. This depends on the recovery requirements of the said data. Suppose you have important files, and you cannot lose 60 minutes of your data at any cost. Then, through the traditional backup, it will take 60 minutes of RPO, and the backup will also happen every 60 minutes.

Continuous replication:-

This is fairly different from the traditional backup plan. It changes the model by running a backup every time a change is made. This results in a number of data transactions that are way more than the conventional limits would allow. Continuous replication might be better in terms of performance than traditional backups but gets confusing to access due to the numerous backups done after every small or big change made.

Final note:-

Understanding the terms and their applications are very important in the case of executing DR plans.

The significant difference that lies between RTO and RPO is that RTO represents the downtime of services which means that time in which you might want to resume operating your system and services again and helps to trace resources for business continuity. On the other hand, RPO represents the amount of data or time you might want to lose at a particular point of downfall and is solely dedicated to finding the backup frequency. Basically, RTO looks forward, and RPO looks back.