Developing a Backup Strategy

There’s a balance that needs to be struck between how often the backups occur and how long it takes to recover. These can be summarized by two different objectives that need to be carefully considered when developing your backup strategy. 

The first is the recovery point objective, or R-P-O. This defines what amount of data will be acceptable to lose in the case of a disaster.Now the knee-jerk answer is, well we can’t afford to lose any data whatsoever. The reality is though that most industries can absorb some amount of loss,even if it’s just a few minutes or hours. And the cost of maintaining a backup solution that allows for no data loss can be prohibitively expensive in terms of the resources required to ensure a constant stream of backups are being performed. 

The other objective that needs to be considered is the recovery time objective, or R-T-O. This takes into consideration the amount of time that the system can be down, and needs to balance the cost of the system being offline against the cost of restoring the system quickly and maintaining the infrastructure and personnel to do this at a moment’s notice.