Service level agreements (SLAs)
Data protection and recovery are key areas in which IT delivers a defined service and it is advisable to offer service level agreements (SLAs) to set expectations with your user groups.
These SLAs can cover a variety of aspects, often by type of site, size of site, dedicated or shared hardware, availability of server platform, whether a site is centrally managed or self-managed, recovery time objective, and recovery point objective.
The following is a non exhaustive list covering data protection and recovery SLAs.
• Versioning
· Whether offered.
o Amount of space allotted.
o Level offered
• Amount of time backups of deleted sites are held before they are deleted.
• Recovery time objective.
o How long a data recovery process will take, different RTOs are often set for different circumstances, local IT outage, organisational wide disaster etc
• Recovery point objective.
o The maximum amount of time between the last available backup and any potential failure point.
Data protection and recovery strategy
You should develop a data protection and recovery strategy for each site, or type of site that you support. For each type of site, evaluate the following:
• Do you need to support content versioning?
• Do you need to support site versioning?
• Do you need to support Recycle Bins?
• Do you need to data sets sites from deletion?
• What level of granularity do you need to provide for recovery (farm, database, site collection, site, item)?
• How large is your maintenance window?
• How large are your databases now, including your content databases and search databases and how much and how fast do you think they will grow?
• What is your fastest recovery time objective?
• What is your shortest recovery point objective? What is your average recovery point objective?