BACKUP AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY
Using recovery time objectives to better plan for Business Continuity
SMBs & SMEs rarely have the IT budgets and available staff resources as their large enterprise counterparts. However, like larger organizations, protecting their data and ensuring they can recover rapidly after a disaster or other event that compromises their data and IT systems is of equal importance.
This white paper reviews what is at stake when businesses fail to adequately protect and manage data as well plan for recovery. We will discuss the relevance of planning in terms of business continuity rather than simple data backup and, furthermore, we’ll look at how to calculate the all-important Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) so that you can architect the appropriate plan for your business and get what you need you need from your backup and business continuity vendor. Downtime is real. It’s not a question of if, but when business will lose data. Moreover, it is very costly. According to research by the Aberdeen Group, it’s a staggering $163,674 per hour on average. Of course, the exact cost depends on company size however the study reveals that even small companies lose approximately $8,581 per hour; medium companies $215,638 per hour; and large enterprises a whopping $686,250 for every hour of downtime.
Regardless…businesses need to plan for downtime.
Image Versus File-Only Backup for Business Continuity
There are two well known types of backup solutions: file and image-based.
A file-based backup does exactly what it sounds like: you choose which files you want to back up, and those files are saved, to an on-site device or to the cloud, whichever type of solution you have chosen. But only the files you choose are saved.
What if you forget to save a key file?
Image-based backup, on the other hand, captures an image of your data in its environment. Thus you have exact replications of what is stored on a server- including the operating system, all configurations and settings, and your preferences. If a server goes down, you can restore it in seconds or minutes, rather than the hours or days it would take to requisition a new server, and install and configure the operating system.