Did you know that as many as 40 percent of businesses affected by disasters, whether man-made or naturally occurring, never recover from it?[1] Oftentimes, these companies never developed a disaster recovery (DR) strategy in advance. Plans must be made far in advance (and evaluated annually) so that if a disaster strikes, your internal teams have clear direction and policies in place to follow immediately.
If your business does not currently have a DR plan, a good place to start is familiarizing yourself with some important terminology. Here are some of the top terms you should consider when working with an expert to develop your DR strategy:
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
RPO is the largest limit volume of time that can be tolerated between mirroring your data. Some enterprises may need a RPO score of zero, which means they can’t lose ANY data. This requires continuous synchronous replication. Other organizations can tolerate modest information gaps of seconds, minutes, hours or even days.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
RTO is a target interval between when an outage occurs, and when an organization needs to be up and running to avoid serious consequences. This includes the time it takes to detect a failure, spin up a backup site, initialize the unsuccessful focus and perform any network pattern to reroute requests to a backup site.
Hot, Warm & Cold Backup
A hot backup site typically houses mirrored standby servers that are always accessible to run a focus after a disaster. This is a costly choice adored by enterprises with brief RTOs and RPOs. A warm backup site generally keeps a primary site backed up, but it can take a warm backup more time to recover after a failure because warm resources, such as tape backups, are not immediately available. A cold backup site mostly has an RPO of hours or days. It is a low-cost option for applications that do not need severe accessibility guarantees.
Geographic Diversity
Another pivotal disaster liberation term, geographic diversity is important since primary and backup sites should be far enough apart from one another to minimize the possibility that a single disaster takes down both sites.
The 365 Data Centers Approach to Disaster Recovery Planning
Our intelligent team members have the experience to custom engineer a disaster recovery solution that meets your company’s RPO and RTO needs. Our 10 East Coast-based facilities allow for geographic diversity and proper hot, warm or cold backup facility points.
365 Data Centers delivers a cloud-ready, secure disaster recovery solution for mission-critical applications that make failover, failback and disaster recovery testing easy, which translates to reduced operational costs and huge time savings. As an added ROI benefit, the solution extends the useful life of hardware and software assets.
Contact us to get in touch with our disaster recovery experts.
[1] CNBC – Hurricane alert: 40 percent of small businesses never recover from a disaster
