How ‘capable’ is your Backup/Disaster Recovery plan? Can you recover to an hour, a day or a week ago? How long will it take to recover?
Recent press stories have shown that many Users and indeed Multi-National Companies are in the dark when it comes to their backup regime. This can be as diverse as an Office 365 User backing up to a USB disk rather than the ‘free and bundled’ OneDrive system, to global brands who struggle to resume normal service quickly in a disaster recovery scenario.
Indeed, back in July it was reported that Garmin, the internationally renowned navigation company, had suffered a ransomware attack resulting in their systems being down for several days. Not only did this attack have a financial implication of a potential £10M ransom pay out, it also had significant micro-economic effects in terms of customers being unable to download fitness sessions and pilots prevented from downloading flight plans for aircraft navigation systems.
Furthermore in August it was reported Adobe, the developer of the world’s best creative apps and services made an update to its Lightroom photo manager application subsequently resulting in the deletion of a swathe of images on Users’ iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches. This update was particularly severe on professional photographers who in some cases had lost two years of edits and, no doubt, faith in an application they have relied on significantly for years.
How embarrassing!
In both cases, if the Companies concerned and Users involved had a decent backup/disaster recovery regime in place, they could have rolled back to the last ‘clean’ backup prior to the ransomware attack and faulty application update, thus bringing services back online in a timely manner and avoiding significant customer inconvenience.
Here at CTO we offer a comprehensive range of backup solutions through both Veeam and Datto that can protect customers in the event of a disaster and will specify the perfect solution for you.
Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective
CTO are highly proficient in designing, specifying and deploying a secure, reliable and fit-for-purpose business continuity/disaster recovery solution.
CTO look at the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – which is how far to roll back in time and the maximum allowable amount of lost data measured in time from a failure occurrence to the last valid backup.
Plus the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) which is related to downtime and represents how long it takes to restore from the incident until normal operations are available to Users.
To put this into context, RPO is about how much data you can afford to lose before it impacts business operations. For example, for a banking system, 1 hour of data loss can be catastrophic as they operate live transactions. At a personal level, you can also think about RPO as the moment you saved a document you are working on for the last time.
In case your system crashes and your progress is lost, how much of your work are you willing to lose before it affects you?
On the other hand, RTO is the timeframe within which application and systems must be restored after an outage. It’s a good practice to measure the RTO starting with the moment the outage occurs. Instead of the moment when the IT team starts to fix the issue. This is a more realistic approach as it represents the exact point when the users start to be impacted.
Would you like help aligning your RTO and RPO values with your business needs?
There is no one-size-fits all solution for a business continuity plan. Companies operate in different sectors with different needs and therefore have varied requirements for their recovery objectives. However in conjunction with the client, who know their business best. CTO can conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to analyse your applications. It can determine which of them are driving your business, generating revenue and are imperative to stay operational. We can then design a ‘capable’ solution tailored to your needs.
