How do you assess your SAN recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)?

1 What is RPO and why is it important?

RPO stands for recovery point objective. It is the amount of data that you can afford to lose in a disaster, measured in time. For example, if your RPO is one hour, it means that you can restore your data to a point that is no more than one hour old. RPO is important because it determines how frequently you need to back up your data and how much storage space you need for your backups. A lower RPO means more frequent and smaller backups, while a higher RPO means less frequent and larger backups.

2 What is RTO and why is it important?

RTO stands for recovery time objective. It is the amount of time that you can afford to be offline in a disaster, measured in hours or days. For example, if your RTO is four hours, it means that you can resume your normal operations within four hours of a disaster. RTO is important because it determines how quickly you need to restore your data and how much redundancy and failover you need for your systems. A lower RTO means faster and more reliable recovery, while a higher RTO means slower and less reliable recovery.

3 How to determine your RPO and RTO?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to what your RPO and RTO should be. They depend on your business needs, your industry standards, your regulatory requirements, and your risk tolerance. To determine your RPO and RTO, you need to conduct a business impact analysis (BIA) and a risk assessment (RA). A BIA identifies the critical processes and data that your business relies on and the impact of losing them. A RA identifies the potential threats and vulnerabilities that your business faces and the likelihood and severity of them. Based on these analyses, you can set your RPO and RTO for each process and data set.

4 How to assess your current RPO and RTO?

Once you have set your target RPO and RTO, you need to assess how well your current backup and recovery plan meets them. You can do this by performing regular tests and audits of your SAN. A test simulates a disaster scenario and measures how long it takes to back up and restore your data. An audit evaluates the quality and integrity of your backup and restore processes and data. By testing and auditing your SAN, you can identify any gaps or issues that may affect your RPO and RTO and take corrective actions.

5 How to improve your RPO and RTO?

If you find that your current backup and recovery plan does not meet your target RPO and RTO, there are several options to consider in order to improve it. Depending on your budget, resources, and goals, you could increase the frequency and granularity of your backups, use incremental or differential backups instead of full backups, compress or deduplicate to reduce the size of your backups, replicate or mirror to create copies of your data in real time, store your backups using cloud or offsite storage, automate or orchestrate to streamline backup and restore processes, use snapshots or clones to create point-in-time copies of your data, virtualize or containerize to reduce complexity and dependencies of your systems, and use load balancing or clustering to distribute the workload and increase availability of your systems.

6 How to monitor your RPO and RTO?

To ensure your backup and recovery plan is effective, efficient, and aligned with your business objectives, you need to monitor your RPO and RTO on an ongoing basis. This involves tracking and reporting the performance and status of your backup and recovery plan, as well as reviewing and updating your target RPO and RTO when necessary. You can use various tools and metrics for monitoring, such as backup success rate and failure rate, backup duration and frequency, restore success rate and failure rate, restore duration and frequency, data loss rate, downtime rate, and SLA compliance rate.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?