By Jon Thordarson, European Technical Support Manager at KeepItSafe
November 6, 2015

KeepItSafe Cloud Backup Expert Tips: How Do You Establish Recovery Time Objectives for your Data?

For every business out there, information and data are among its most precious assets. Data protection issues are a concern for all businesses, regardless of size or location. Businesses are generating more digital data than at any time in history. There has been an explosive growth in the amount of business data. The amount of data stored has grown three hundred fold in the past three years alone. Businesses are turning more and more data into useful information, and that trend, combined with increased regulatory and legal accountability, has compounded the problem of how to store, manage, archive, and ensure the safety and security of all this data.

Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are seeking a way to automate and simplify their complex data backup and recovery infrastructure and processes. With limited budgets and reduced head counts, SMBs are more often looking to online backup solutions as an inherent part of their backup strategy. Online backup and disaster recovery services, offered by some cloud backup companies, provide significant advantages over traditional solutions as they include both onsite and offsite backup and storage.

One of the biggest challenges faced by SMBs is maximizing business continuity, while minimizing business disruption, following a server failure, which could be caused by natural disaster, such as: floods, earthquake, fire, tornado; or by non-natural disasters, such as: theft, device failure, accidental deletion. Since resources are limited in most companies, disaster recovery scenarios are often not tested, which leads to panic and confusion during disasters, which in turn increases the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Having a server out of commission is never gratifying, but the effects of business disruption are more painful for SMBs than they are for large enterprises, that can in most cases absorb the effects of a server crash.

Hence, it is very crucial to keep Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) at a level that helps the enterprise avoid the serious effects of a break in the flow of daily business. The RTO is the maximum amount of time enterprise systems can be out of service — from when a disruption occurs to the moment the system are available again.

Enterprise Cloud Backup software like KeepItSafe helps minimize RTO and avoid the consequences of a long-term break in business continuity. Since most backup and recovery strategies are bound by technological limitations, enterprise servers that have many terabytes (TB) can take many hours or days to restore from tape backup solutions.

Tape backups located at off-site storage further increases the RTO. Off-site tape vaulting involves, having a disaster, finding the tapes or disk in the off-site storage facility, additional time to transport the media to your environment and then the recovery can be started. It follows that enterprise grade online backup solutions significantly reduce RTOs in comparison to restoration from tapes.

With a fully managed online backup and disaster recovery service, the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are clearly defined with documented recovery times. Key elements like encryption is included as a standard feature to comply with auditing standards, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and FIPS 140-2.

About the Author:
Jon Thordarson, KeepItSafe’s European Technical Support Manager, has over 15 years as an industry executive. He is an expert in the world of online backup and data protection. Prior to leading the development of technical infrastructure at KeepItSafe®, Jon co-founded and served as CTO for SecurStore – a leading provider of cloud backup services for enterprise networks. Thousands of businesses trust Jon’s guidance with fluctuating data-compliance requirements through the online publication, “EU Data Protection Regulation”. As a principal contributor, Jon identifies the challenges and opportunities of the EU Data Protection Regulation, while providing expert advice for readers to meet new compliance standards. Visit KeepItSafe’s website here: www.KeepItsafe.com

 

 

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