Disaster Recovery has become a supplement for mission critical application and any business operation so we decided to write about What is Disaster Recovery: RPO and RTO?
What is Disaster Recovery: RPO and RTO?
“Disaster Recovery” means having a replica of One System to Another at different Location. The Disaster Recovery can be configure for mission critical application because it helps to resume the services from Disaster Recovery Sites within shortest time.
There is two important aspects needs to consider for planning and setting a Disaster Recovery Site i.e. RPO and RTO.
What is RPO and RTO?
The RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective, It’s define by considering that, how much data loss the organization can bare.
Example, If the organization can bare the data loss of 15 minutes then the RPO will be 15 minutes. We can set the RPO from 0 minutes to any number of hours..
The RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective, It’s define by considering that, how much downtime the Organization can bare ?
Example, If the Organization can bare the downtime of 120 minutes i.e. 2 hours to restore the affected services from Disaster Recovery Site then the RTO will be 120 (2 hours).
The RPO and RTO helps Organizations to choose best disaster recovery plans because based on RPO and RTO only we can decide that which type of Disaster Recovery Site we should have?
Hot Disaster Recovery Site, Warm Disaster Recovery Site or Cold Disaster Recovery Site?
- The Hot Disaster Recovery site means having a fully functional Disaster Recovery Site, The Hardware, Software and Real-time data as a result, the Disaster Recovery Site is ready for immediate activation of affected services in case of a disaster situation.
- The Warm Disaster Recovery Site means having a prepared Disaster Recovery Site that does not have real time data as a result, we can add/remove additional resources to maintain/load the real-time data and activate the affected services from Disaster Recovery Site during disaster situation.
- The Cold Disaster Recovery Site means having infrastructure at Disaster Recovery site to support IT systems and data however, no Pre-setup System / Data for activation of affected services from Disaster Recovery Site. Normally, This method is used as addition to Hot and Warm Disaster Recovery Sites during a long-term disaster situation.
Below are the types Issues / Failure can be considered as a disaster:
- Application Level Issue / Failure
- Database Level Issue / Failure
- VM Level Issue / Failure
- Host Level Issue / Failure
- Hardware Level Issue/Failure
- Network Level Issue/Failure
- Data Center or Infrastructure Level Issue / Failure
- Earthquake or Building disaster
- Citywide disaster
- Regional disaster
- National disaster
- Multinational disaster
Due to any of above disaster the Organization may face the issues like, Data Loss, Financial Loss, User/Customer dissatisfaction due to delay in service or a loss of productivity of Business Users due unavailability of Mission Critical Applications.
So, to overcome such disaster, need to have Disaster Recovery Plan. Such as..
Virtualized Disaster Recovery Plan: For Setting up and Implement Disaster Recovery on a Virtualization Platform.
Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan: Cloud based Disaster Recovery Plan for faster recovery.
Network Disaster Recovery Plan: A plan for recovering the Network by having multiple Plan of actions.
Datacenter Disaster Recovery Plan: A Datacenter Disaster Recovery is consist of Infrastructure related readiness.
This is all about the Disaster Recovery, hope this post help you to understand What is Disaster and its importance.
