RTO, RPO, and RGE - Three Acronyms You Need to Know in Disaster Recovery
As Hurricane Helene barrels towards my home on the West coast of Central Florida, I watch the ominous cone of impending doom on the nightly news with confidence. As a seasoned Floridian, I know the drill when it comes to storm prep.
My pantry is stocked with 5 days' worth of shelf stable food. Our gas tanks and water jugs are full. The backup UPS and mobile hotspot internet connection are all set up and ready to go, in case the power or main internet goes down. My homeowner's insurance is squared away as well - an important safety net. Living through these storms, you learn that having these essentials on hand can make a big difference.
The storm got me thinking about Disaster Recovery in the cloud. When you look at disaster prep for your IT infrastructure, are you as prepared for calamity as the average Floridian is for a hurricane?
First off, what constitutes a disaster? A disaster can be any unexpected event that disrupts the normal functioning of a system or organization. Accidentally deleting a document can be a disruption, but so is inadvertently overwriting 2000 documents. Both events are disasters, just in varying degrees of severity.
This brings me back to the disaster recovery acronyms in the headline:
RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective. The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) refers to the maximum amount of time an organization can tolerate before a business process or system must be restored after a disaster or disruption occurs.
For example, suppose a company has a critical customer database that is essential for their business operations. The RTO for this database could be defined as 4 hours.
This means that in the event of a disaster that disrupts access to the primary database, the company has an objective to restore full access and functionality to the database within 4 hours.
RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) refers to the maximum acceptable amount of data loss that an organization can tolerate in the event of a disaster or system failure. It is the point in time to which data must be restored to resume normal operations.
For example, if an organization's RPO is 1 hour, it means that they can tolerate up to 1 hour of data loss. In the event of a disaster, the organization would need to be able to restore data from a backup or replication source that is no more than 1 hour old.
While the cloud and managed services afford many redundancies, a proper Disaster Recovery plan is imperative. Simply relying on the inherent redundancies of cloud and managed services isn't enough. Organizations need to take an active role in designing, testing, and continuously updating their Disaster Recovery plans. This level of preparedness is essential to safeguarding the business, protecting against data loss, and ensuring the ability to quickly resume mission-critical functions when the unexpected occurs.
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RGE stands for Resume Generating Event. It’s the byproduct of not knowing what your RPO and RTO are before disaster strikes. Using my hurricane analogy, it’s Florida Man who lives in a flood zone and refuses to storm prep or evacuate when a CAT 5 is headed straight for them.??
If RTO and RPO are new terms to you, let me point you towards some resources to dive a little deeper:
For your on-premises apps: A whitepaper on Disaster Recovery of On-Premises Applications to AWS ??
For your AWS Cloud-based apps: Prescriptive Guidance - Backup and recovery approaches on AWS ??
For aspiring cloud systems admins, I highly recommend pursuing the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate certification to validate your cloud technical ability to manage workloads on AWS. ??
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Technical Trainer at AWS
2 个月Love the analogy stay safe Ted!