Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

The RPO in conjunction with the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the basis on which data protection strategy is developed.

For example if you do a daily full backup at 1am of your MS Exchange Server and you have a have a failure Thursday at 11.30am., your recovery point will probably be 1 a.m.  Wednesday; in other words, your recovery will succeed if you can recover the state of your Exchange data to that particular point in time. You may find however that your organisation has an objective to recovery to a point of 1 hour previous i.e. it has accepted that it is acceptable to 'loose' an hour’s work/productivity.

Recovery Point Objective describes the age of the data you want the ability to restore in the event of a disaster. For example, if your RPO is 6 hours, you want to be able to restore systems back to the state they were in, as of no longer than 6 hours ago. To achieve this, you need to be making backups or other data copies at least every 6 hours. Any data created or modified inside your recovery point objective will be either lost or must be recreated during a recovery. If your RPO is that no data is lost, synchronous remote copy solutions are your only choice.

When a data corruption or other outage occurs, your current best option for recovery probably includes a restore process and depending on the size of your database, this may take hours and even days. In most environments, a lengthy recovery process with a loss of data will be unacceptable.

When business application failures occur your users expect you to recover data as quickly as possible. Deploying a solution that provides quick recovery can provide an immediate return to your organisation but requires a detailed knowledge of the underlying technologies. Alpha has years of experience in designing solution to meet organisations recovery time and recovery point objectives. Contact us for an indepenedent advice.