Now more than ever, organizations are at risk of suffering a data loss event, either due to natural disasters, ransomware attacks, or even malicious actions from those within the organization. As a result, a crucial part of your organization’s IT strategy is expecting the unexpected, and having a strong plan for data loss prevention to recover quickly and minimize the impact of these events.
An effective cloud data protection solution can ensure your organization stays up and running. As such, your IT team will need to scour the market to find the best solution to reliably and cost-effectively protect your valuable data. To properly navigate today’s complicated cloud data protection marketplace, your team will need to understand and evaluate potential vendors on the following two key concepts:
- Recovery point objective (RPO) — How much un-backed-up data your business can afford to lose because of a loss event
- Recovery time objective (RTO) — How long you can afford to take to get systems up and running again after a loss event
In this blog, we’ll explore what exactly RPO/RTOs are, how to test a solution on RPO/RTO, and take a look at how Druva’s cloud data protection solution approaches challenges with RPO/RTO in mind to reduce both cost and complexity.
What is RPO/RTO, and why does it matter?
A recovery point is the elapsed time between a backup and loss event. All the data your team has accumulated between your last backup and the loss event is unrecoverable. In general, this means RPO is your backup frequency — for example, if you back up every six hours, you stand to lose up to six hours of data. Ideally, were a data loss event to take place, it would happen immediately following a backup.
Your RTO is a goal for how long it takes to get back to business-as-usual following a loss event. This includes getting infrastructure and applications online as well as restoring lost data and files. Were your team to lose access to an on-premises data center, your RTO would include the time it takes for repairs, the installation of new servers, getting applications back online, and reconnecting with uncompromised data. Typically, different parts of your business will have differing RTOs — marketing may take 12 hours to get back to work while development may take only three. You will need to prioritize the recovery of each part of your business according to your specific needs. It is important to note that RTO does not account for time to catch up on missed work.
Factors for calculating your RPO/RTO
Ultimately, the calculation of these objectives requires determining the value of each business process and estimating the loss in revenue associated with downtime for each. It’s not a simple process, however, if you approach the problem from the standpoint of optimizing your data protection, you will most likely also optimize your RPO/RTO. Typically, there are three main processes affecting RPO/RTO — storage, networking/bandwidth, and human factors.
IT groups are increasingly leveraging cloud storage services such as AWS to ensure availability while minimizing capital expenditures and maintenance overhead. This is a strong approach as it enables scalability with a virtually infinite capacity for the ever-increasing volumes of enterprise data. While the cloud may have an impact on your network speed and bandwidth, perhaps most importantly it reduces the potential impact of human error and automates several traditionally time-consuming processes.
Optimizing your RPO/RTO
Achieving a near-zero RPO/RTO is typically only a practical goal for highest-priority use cases, such as web order entry or processes involving sensitive data. While expensive, achieving a very low RPO/RTO is possible using hardware such as flash storage arrays either on-premises or in the cloud.
Recovery in hours or minutes is adequate for most use cases, and there are multiple ways to configure the solution based on your specific needs. As before, cloud storage is almost always the most cost-effective approach for several reasons. For one, you can take advantage of tiered pricing for high-availability “hot,” medium-availability “warm,” and “cold” storage. Note that for the hottest access, you may pay up to 100x the cost of cold storage. We discussed the advantages of cold storage in-depth in a recent blog, have a look to learn more.
The importance of testing
Perhaps the only way to have confidence that your organization is prepared for an outage and can meet your RPO/RTO is regular testing — at least several times per year. Simulating an IT failure or other disruption exposes the unexpected and enables IT to fix shortfalls before a real loss event occurs. You will need to test the storage, the network, and how well your staff can perform. This will enable an accurate assessment of how realistic your RPO/RTOs are, as well as the effectiveness of your data protection solution — with your data, in your environment.
Meet your ideal RPO/RTO with Druva’s leading cloud data protection
The limitations of legacy backup solutions make them a hindrance to meeting your RPO/RTO, and your ideal solution must reliably provide a swift recovery while protecting your business needs. As discussed, cloud-based SaaS applications have the capabilities and functionality to protect your data and enable a simple, speedy recovery.
Natively integrated with AWS S3, Druva provides a cloud-based data protection service, ranging from backup/recovery to enhanced cyber resilience. The solution also delivers all-inclusive services with no need to manage hardware, software, or the associated cost and complexity. With Druva, your organization receives:
- Reduced operational expenses and total-cost-of-ownership (TCO)
- Increased cyber resilience and compliance for your data
- The ability to accelerate cloud projects globally
Next steps
Take the stress out of data recovery with a strong third-party solution to achieve your RPO/RTO goals. Druva’s 100 percent SaaS approach to cloud data protection enables the fastest RPO/RTOs at the lowest cost, independent of data architecture. Importantly, If your data demands continuous availability and on-premises backup hardware, Druva enables RPO/RTOs of ZERO, while maintaining the 3-2-1 rule for safety with offsite backups. With Druva, eliminate on-premises backup hardware entirely, and receive optimal RTO/RPOs via automatically-tiered AWS S3 storage.
Download the eBook to learn how your organization can better adopt best practices to reduce its RPO/RTO.