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Knowing Your Recovery

Time Objective (RTO)

P. Spratt
Cable & Wireless

n 2019, Cable & Wireless, a part of Liberty Latin and 0’s can render a live dataset irrevocably unusable.
America, celebrated its fifth consecutive year on An effective Disaster Recovery plan should be viewed
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery- as an insurance policy for your organization and as
Ias-a-Service (DRaaS) being recognized for its such should not appear at the bottom of the list of your
products and services alongside industry giants such as competing priorities.
Microsoft & IBM. In this article, Peter Spratt, C&W’s
Director of Data Center, Cloud & Continuity Solutions Identifying your RTO
discusses the importance of knowing an organization’s Having a DR plan is commendable but for it to be a
Recovery Time Objective. success it is important to understand what needs to be
protected under such a plan. Conducting a Business
The 2019 hurricane season is over, but disasters Impact Analysis or BIA will help in this endeavor by
still can happen. differentiating and classifying critical and non-critical
When a Caribbean hurricane season ends, fears of functions. Depending on your industry or location this
possible catastrophic loss (human and financial) begin may be required by law or by local regulatory agencies.
to subside, however, the truth is that unwelcomed As part of an effective BIA, two metrics should be
and unforeseen events can happen at any time. For considered:
organizations dependent on technology for their • Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - the point
success, mitigating against key system failure should to where a system should be able to recover to
be a priority; the potential for data loss is omnipresent after the event. Typically, the objective will be
throughout an organization and can happen at any time. to recover just prior to the interuption.
The ‘Disaster’ is not the event itself but rather the lack
of effectiveness when attempting a recovery. To this end, • Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - the
many organizations often invest in limited IT resources maximum tolerable length of time it takes an
in developing what they hope is an effective Disaster organization to resume operations after an event.
Recovery (DR) plan. No matter the cause (accidental
or malicious) failures can result in the potential loss of The Recovery Time Objective (or simply the RTO) is,
terabytes of data throughout the organization. However, in my opinion, the more important of the two metrics.
even a slight disruption of those innocuous binary 1’s It is concerned with the maximum tolerable length

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