Some Further Back-up Considerations

RTO and RPO Considerations

Continuing with the establishment of the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) as essential elements of your Business Continuity Plan (see Backup Considerations parts 1 and 2), you should keep in mind that your plan will address not only the IT aspect of keeping your organisation up and running, but everything else from arranging temporary premises to buying or renting office equipment to redirecting phones to reassuring customers that the business is running normally. The considerations are myriad; the more comprehensive the plan, the more likely the business will survive a disaster. The alternative is to simply hope that the gods of chance are in a benevolent humour and choose to smile upon you in your moment of need…I would opine that this approach is unlikely to work. The scenario from the previous blog (Backup Considerations part 2) where some arbitrary timescales were used to define an RTO is an interesting one. It does make the assumption that some misfortune has befallen one of your servers and that the remainder of the network, PCs, switches, routers, printers and the building that houses your business are all unaffected. What about unit that backs up your servers and data? Again, in the above scenario, the assumption is that this is still intact and accessible. But what can you do if you lose access to the site and the backups?

Off-Site Backup

One essential element of any recovery plan is to maintain off-site backup. There are many different approaches to this. For example, tapes, USB drives, even DVDs are taken offsite every night, in a variety of handbags, backpacks, pockets; possibly even a data storage company will pick them up once a week for you. So if the local backup is inaccessible, you’ll have to retrieve your backup from one of these sources above. At best you have lost a whole day’s data, possibly the whole week.  It’s looking like a compound disaster now. In the next thrilling instalment let’s look at how you can preserve your data off-site and make sure it is as recent as possible, that it is useable and that you can at least access your data, if not the whole server. In the meantime, if you have any concerns, just get in touch with us at Excellimore. We can advise you on the most effective strategies to maintain, improve and preserve your business IT requirements.