Involve your business stakeholders in discussions on system RPOs and RTOs. For many companies, an RTO of few hours is the norm. However, as with RPO, a shorter RTO requires faster storage, networks, and technologies – so it is more expensive. When systems are down, your company loses money and you need to recover fast to minimize losses. You can also have tiered RPOs - shorter RPOs for critical systems, and longer RPOs for secondary systems.Īnother important variable is recovery time objective (RTO) - how fast you can recover from the moment of a disaster to the moment you return to normal operations. With modern backup solutions, you can implement RPOs as short as a few minutes. Many small and medium-sized companies usually define an RPO of 24 hours, which means you need to back up daily. A longer RPO is more affordable, but it means losing more data. This period is called the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - the maximum period that you are willing to lose data on your systems because of an event.Ī shorter RPO means losing less data, but it requires more backups, more storage capacity, and more computing and network resources for backup to run. Your colleagues are constantly changing data, and in the event of a disaster, all the data created from the latest backup to the moment of failure will be lost.
Once you decide on the scope of your backups, the next important decision is how often you need to back up and define a backup schedule. Instead, you need to implement multiple, disparate solutions - or better still - use a solution that backs up every device and system in your backup scope. For example, if you have a physical server in your data center, a solution that only backs up your VMs isn’t enough. Otherwise, some data will go unprotected or you may need multiple backup solutions. When you choose a backup solution, be sure that it can protect all your data.
Your mantra is “back up everything, back up often.” New devices, solutions, services all use data. Revisit your backup scope every time you change the infrastructure. And, don’t forget mobile devices - your CEO’s tablet could hold critical company data that can be more important than the data stored on some of your servers. If you use a cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), you want to include that in your scope. If you use virtualization, you want to back up your hosts and management console, not just your virtual machines (VMs). To reduce the risk of data loss, you want to back up files and databases, but you also want to back up your operating systems, applications, configuration - everything you can.
The Backup Administrator’s primary initial task is to understand, define, and manage what data to back up and protect.
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