You may be focusing on moving to the cloud and accelerating your digital transformation, but don’t lose sight of your backup and recovery strategy. Backup and recovery is the process of duplicating data and storing it in a secure place in case of loss or damage, and then restoring that data to a location, the original one or a safe alternative, so that you can use it in your business operations.
Based on your business vertical and your security strategy, we will recommend the levels of data backup and recovery you may need for the unique challenges you face.
Parameters for Protection
The two most important parameters for data protection and disaster recovery are:
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
The RPO describes the time that can pass during an event before data loss exceeds that tolerance. This indicates how often you should backup your data.
For example, what if an outage occurs? If the RPO for your business is 12 hours and the last good copy of your available data is from 10 hours ago, you are still within the RPO’s parameters for your business continuity plan. This is where you specify the last point in time we could achieve tolerable business recovery processing, given how much data will be lost during that time.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
The RTO is the amount of real time your business has to restore its processes at an acceptable service level after a disaster to avoid harmful consequences associated with the disruption. The RTO answers the question: “How much time after notification about the business process disruption should it take to resume normal operations?”
Another way to think about the difference between recovery time objective and recovery point objective is that RPO represents a changing amount of data that will require re-entry or may be lost during network downtime. RTO represents how much time can pass before the interruption blocks the flow of normal business operations and is unacceptable.
Compliance Considerations
You must also consider how government and industry regulations and internal governance policies impact your backup needs. The breadth of government data regulations worldwide significantly affects how you store and use customer, employee, and sensitive health and financial data, making it challenging to keep up with internal and external compliance requirements. Regulations like HIPAA, for example, require exact copies of electronic Protected Health Information to be encrypted, stored offsite, and backed up frequently and securely while also undergoing regular testing. Many companies have a security management process in place, but testing allows you to see how quickly and effectively you can react and respond to a cyber risk.
You also must adhere to regulations requiring what data to save and how long. Storing large datasets for an extended period requires efficient storage. Your backup strategy should be flexible enough to accommodate the data you need to keep now and consider your forecast for future growth.
Reach out to iTelecom to protect your IT investment, employees, and clients.
