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Understanding RTO’s and RPO’s Within Your SLA and How to Apply Them to DocAve

How much downtime will users tolerate without losing trust in SharePoint, where 24×7 availability is essential for high productivity? How much lost data is acceptable during failure? Many organizations implement internal Service Level Agreements (SLA), a contract between users and system architects and administrators, to define and deliver appropriate service for internal infrastructure.

Two of the most specific and important components within an SLA are Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Both components are extremely important in any disaster recovery plan.
 

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

This objective represents the age of files that must be recovered from backup storage to resume normal operations in case of site, system, or network failure. The RPO is retroactive from the moment of actual failure. It can be set in seconds, minutes, hours, or days but must correspond to the amount of tolerable lost data.

Simply put, RPO represents a minimum frequency with which backups must be made. For example, if the RPO is one day, backup must be performed at least once per day, and an RPO of one hour requires hourly backups. Using DocAve Backup and Recovery with its granular backup capabilities and  up-to-the-minute platform recovery allows you to differentiate data based on importance and run it on different schedules.

 

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

This objective represents the maximum acceptable downtime of a site, system, network, or application during a failure or disaster. The RTO is usually based on lost revenue or productivity measured in seconds, minutes, hours, or days and corresponds to the measurable uptime (99.99%, 99.999% etc.) within an SLA.

It is difficult to determine the downtime cost for Enterprise portal applications, specifically SharePoint. The cost depends on long-term and intangible effects and immediate, short-term, or tangible factors. SharePoint within various business units results in different measurement strategies. After the RTO for an application is defined, administrators can decide which DocAve disaster recovery modules are appropriate.

For example, if the RTO for a given application is a few hours, DocAve Backup and Recovery will help quickly restore the environment. However, if the RTO is 10 minutes, DocAve High Availability with an off-site stand-by environment is recommended in addition to DocAve Backup and Recovery (used for primary system restoration). If data corruption is a concern, then DocAve Backup and Recovery can be leveraged to recover specific documents, lists, or sites to a point in time.

Understanding these components will help you choose optimal DocAve data protection modules for your business. Please contact sales for more information.