When it comes to your business’ data backup and disaster recovery, you want to have clear outcomes that you aim for, as well as metrics that help you gauge success. Today, we want to highlight some of the most important metrics associated with data backup and disaster recovery, as well as the importance of testing your systems. Trust us when we say that a solid data backup and disaster recovery strategy is crucial to the success of any business—including yours.
Specifically, we will look at three important factors that will contribute to your data backup and disaster recovery: recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and backup success rate.
How much data can your business stand to lose from a disaster? While you might be tempted to say “none of it,” well, that’s not always a realistic expectation. Your business will likely have certain types of data that will be more valuable than others. If push comes to shove, you might have to make some tough decisions about what data you want to provide with additional protections. Regulations and compliance may also factor into your decision. Generally speaking, it’s safe to say that you’ll want certain data, like customer transactions and financial records, to have a low RPO. In contrast, other less important data might have a higher RPO.
How quickly do you want to get back in action following a disaster? This is essentially what RTO boils down to. It is the acceptable level of downtime for recovering data and restoring business operations post-disaster. Ask yourself how long it will take to get back to normal operations and what systems need to be active for your organization to function with minimal loss. If you can appropriately plan with these metrics in mind, you’ll be in a good spot to keep a disaster from tanking your organization’s future.
Finally, you want to put both RPO and RTO to the test with backup testing to ensure that you can effectively carry out your plan and achieve your desired outcomes. Consider how many of your backups occur without any errors or failures, and work to keep that number as high as possible. You want the number to be at least 95 percent or higher to ensure data integrity and reliability.
Besides, it’s a best practice to ensure that your backups work properly. Having a plan without testing is like having no plan at all.
A business that waits too long to consider data backup and disaster recovery is playing with fire. If you want to secure your business’ success in the future, you cannot wait for something bad to happen and then react to it. You need to be proactive and future-minded, considering your business' needs… not if it needs data backup, but when it does. To get started, contact First Column IT at (571) 470-5594 today.
