When your business is whirring, it takes only one data loss event to grind operations to a halt. System outages, cyberattacks — even disgruntled employees — can quickly disrupt business.
That’s why the ability to access your company’s vital data at any point in time is essential. Mitigating downtime also protects your company from compounding impacts of data loss and corruption like lost costs, productivity, and brand reputation.
When developing a backup and recovery plan that minimizes downtime, you’ll first need to establish your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
What is RTO (recovery time objective)?
RTO is the maximum amount of time your organization allows for bringing systems and applications back online after an outage. If multiple data servers or systems crash, your business will inevitably experience some downtime until the issue is resolved. But RTO refers to the amount of time your systems can be down without causing significant issues within your systems. Each organization should calculate its RTO as part of its disaster recovery plan.
Before these situations arise, establishing a timeline until a disaster upsets operations can help you map out a solid recovery strategy. You may have different RTOs for different applications, since each one serves a unique purpose. And depending on the extent of the data loss, you might choose to restore your entire database, or granularly restore individual records.
What is RPO (recovery point objective)?
RPO is the maximum amount of data an organization can lose before it causes significant damage. RPO is measured from the time of outage to the most recent accurate backup. For example, if you have an outage and your last valid backup was 24 hours ago, your RPO is 24 hours.
While RTO focuses on time, RPO measures the amount of data your business can lose before impacting processes. To compute your RPO, examine your applications and decide how critical each data set is to daily operations. After performing this analysis, you can determine your organization’s RPO and how frequently you need to back up business data.
RPO affects downtime differently than RTO because it depends on how often you conduct backups. For example, if your systems back up at 9:00 p.m. every night and a failure occurs at midnight, you may not experience much data loss.
A data loss event that happens in the middle of the day, on the other hand, can have significant consequences. With the proper RPO, you can protect vital information. This strategy allows your company to return to normal operations more easily and efficiently.
The Key Difference Between RTO and RPO
RTO is the maximum amount of time it should take to recover from an outage based on your organization’s specific systems, while RPO is the time between the outage and the last backup. RPO indicates the potential data loss window by understanding when you will not be able to rely on your data backup. While they are different, they go hand in hand because you must recover before your RTO to stay within your RPO window and avoid permanent data loss. For example, if your RPO is 24 hours and you do not recover systems within that timeframe, any data created after the last backup could be lost.
Selecting the right backup and recovery solution
While developing your disaster recovery plan, make sure your backup and recovery solution can meet your RPO and RTO goals. There are several features to look for in a solution that can help you reach the lowest RTO and RPO possible, including:
- Custom scheduling of backups: Providers that offer customized schedules allow you to automate backups at intervals that suit your distinct needs.
- Proactive alerts: Services that alert you of anomalies with your data can help you address issues before they become a bigger problem.
- Granular recovery options: Granular recovery lets you restore specific data as opposed to your entire system, saving you time and resources.
Minimize downtime with Own
By backing up all of your Salesforce data, metadata and attachments daily, Own minimizes your RPO, or the amount of data your organization will lose, and RTO, the time it will take to recover.
Our High-Frequency Backup feature goes even further by backing up highly transactional, frequently changing data as often as every hour. Smart Alerts notify you when data is changed, deleted or corrupted, based on your set rules or statistical outliers. You can also recover specific data from any backup in your history without impacting new data, effectively mitigating downtime in the process.
Contact us today to learn more about how our backup and recovery solutions can streamline your business's recovery efforts.
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