The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable length of time that can elapse before the lack of certain business data severely impacts the business. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) describes the acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. A balance of RTO/RPO with cost typically forms the basis for many disaster recovery strategies.
The vast majority of businesses, especially small businesses, have not thought enough about these concepts and how RTO and RPO affects there business functions.
Online backups or off-site vaulting of your information can protect the copies from the disaster, but can have significant impact on both RPO and RTO. Online backup might have "up to the minute" backup capability (good RPO) but have very poor RTO. Replacing a server's hard drive might require hundreds gigabytes of information. Streaming 1TB of data over a T1 line could take weeks to accomplish! If a single file is lost and needs to be recovered -- online backup would generally do a great job (good RPO/RTO for small amounts of data).
Tape backup located offsite can present situations with both poor RTO and RPO. Offsite tape vaulting recovery involves, having a disaster, finding the tapes or disk in the offsite storage facility, additional time to transport the media to you and then recover (poor RTO). If tapes are going offsite once a day or even once a week, you may consider this a poor RPO if the file you just deleted is from this morning
Using onsite disk in addition to offsite tape vaulting can improve both RTO and RPO but comes at a cost. Offsite vaulting can cost thousands per month making this strategy too expensive for all but the biggest businesses.
Using disaster proof storage hardware designed to survive disasters caneliminate the monthly vaulting cost of tape and still take advantage of disk based storage.
If you could keep a copy of your information at your home or business, and know that the copy could survive a natural disaster, then you can greatly improve your RTO and RPO as the information you need is quickly available and current. The ioSafe Protection Technology makes keeping local copies safe from natural disasters a reality.
