You're playing Mario Brothers. You just passed a checkpoint and...BAM! You are squashed by Bowser. The good news is, you get to return to the last saved checkpoint without starting over. This works the same way with data backups for your business. After a backup has been ran, you have set a checkpoint for your data. The difference between a checkpoint in Mario Bros. and a backup for your business is that Mario is a game. So don't let your business run out of lives.
In our previous blog post, you learned about RTO (Recovery Time Objective), which is how much time your business can go without accessing its critical systems and data. Another key element to your business continuity plan is RPO (Recovery Point objective), which is a checkpoint for your business' data.
Ask yourself, "How much data can I afford to lose?" Is it one day? Two days? Or is it as little as a few
hours? RPO is setting the limit of how much data your business can afford to lose. For example, if you backup your data every day at 6pm, then your RPO is 24 hours. So any data entered after the last backup is lost and must be entered again.
If you lose an entire day's worth of data, you stand to lose quite a bit of money. Possibly even a few customers in the process. What you need to consider for your business is the amount of valuable data that is saved into your system every day, or more specifically, every hour. Doing this will give you a realistic idea of how far back you can safely set your RPO checkpoint.
Have you set an RPO Goal for your business?
Maybe your RTO and RPO isn't important because you have never experienced a system failure, and restoring a backup from the day before or last week wouldn't be a big deal.
Learn more about business continuity by downloading our free eBook. Click the link below.
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