RPO - What It Is and Why It Is Important for Disaster Recovery

Posted by alvina on January 28th, 2018

We live in the time when we rely heavily on automation for faster operations. While technology and automation have generally made most tasks easier, faster and more convenient, security threats are also becoming more imminent - and challenging. In a blink of an eye, your company can suffer from the loss of important data and files.

So, nowadays whether you like it or not data loss has become the price of every business transactions. And, if your company is not well-prepared for this, it can threaten or even halt your business operations. This is where a good business continuity plan matters.

Business Continuity Plan: What It Is and Why You Should Care

Businesses are facing a variety of threats ranging from natural disasters such as fire and extreme weather disturbances to manmade threats such as the act of sabotage and information hacking.

A business continuity plan or the BCP is one of the important components when we are talking about disaster recovery plan.It is a plan designed to make sure that your company's transactions can continue even in times of disasters and emergencies.BCP is important to ensure that your company can avoid and mitigate the risks that are expected when your business operations are disrupted.

There are two parameters that are considered crucial among others for Business Continuity Plans:

Recovery Time Objective or RTO

This refers to the length of time that a certain company can afford a downtime without suffering from significant losses.

Recovery Point Objective or RPO

Why RPO is Necessary for Your Business Continuity Plan

When it comes to business continuity plans one of the most important things to take into account is your company's Recovery Point Objectives or RPO.

In a nutshell, Rpo recovery point objectiverefers to the maximum amount of data loss calculated over time. You can think of RPO as a part of your review prior to the occurrence of a disaster where you would like to back track or go back in order to retrieve your files when they were not yet corrupted or affected by the disaster.

Here is a clearer RPO backup scenario, for instance, if it is determined that the RPO is set at one hour, it usually follows that the data backup will be done at an hour interval. If RPO is set at two days or 48 hours, then the backup should be made at 48 hours of interval. As you can see the RPO helps to identify the least amount or frequency of time that the backup must be done.

Conclusion

Determining your RPO business continuity is an important step towards disaster recovery. RPO helps the IT team decide over the backup storage that will be required so the company can resume their normal transactions during the times of disasters or unexpected system failures. Moreover, once you have identified your RPO you can identify the right approach for your backup and restore processes as well as the appropriate disaster recovery technology that you can employ.