Downtime and cloud computing: the role of cloud computing in RTO and RPO planning

By 2012, the average downtime cost per hour increased to between 98,000 and 138,000 dollars. Although the exact impact and actual costs of the downtime that may be incurred by different businesses vary, the recent series of extreme weather events has prompted many businesses to start pressing for business Continuity Planning (BCP).

The importance of applications and the cost of downtime

Using a market-based approach, the impact of downtime can be understood through the importance of the application: mission-critical and business-critical applications. If a mission-critical application breaks down, it does not generate enterprise yo revenue, service level agreements (SLAs) are broken, and customer losses are almost certain. The failure of critical business applications means that employees ' productivity declines, while also undermining customer confidence and potentially loss of corporate revenue. Enterprise mastering downtime costs is the starting point for understanding disaster recovery. This also illustrates the options for providing the best return on investment (ROI), as well as the exact amount of disaster recovery and maintaining a business continuity budget.

However, despite the variety of technology choices, without an accurate definition of RTO policy, even the best IT companies may have difficulty distinguishing which systems are critical in the event of a disaster. The relevant people in the enterprise must work together with the IT department and must set clear time goals in advance so that online recovery can take place quickly. In addition to providing direction, designing RTO policies will also give IT departments the opportunity to identify obstacles to RTO goals.

Similarly, recovery point objectives (RPO) Help to determine how much information, including information from a few minutes ago to traditional legacy, must be restored. As the amount of data collected by the enterprise increases and is more valuable to the enterprise, the RPO window will continue to expand in only two directions, and more historical data will be considered important for RPO policies, so the initial RPO point is getting closer to the disaster event.

The cloud infrastructure can also provide the ability to adjust the level of recovery Services (RSL). RSL is a percentage measurement (0-100%) that can measure the percentage of computing power required by a production system in the event of a disaster. For example, if a large call center collects call statistics that are flooded, only a small fraction of the production capacity is required. However, if a large financial institution experiences the same disaster, the full production capacity will require repositioning the end-user to a separate geographic location and minimizing the impact on end users during maintenance. From an economic point of view, these two options are completely different.

In many cases, data center service providers often hear customers demanding immediate recovery and 0 data loss when defining the objectives of business continuity planning. While this is unrealistic, from a technical standpoint, this is an achievable goal, and RTO and RPO will significantly affect infrastructure, replication, and backup strategies, especially frequencies. However, business goals must weigh costs, which is like a parabolic growth that requires RTO and RPO to fall.

Data centers and data center service providers may find their roles changing more and more. In a recent study by Forrester, senior analyst Rachel Dines wrote: "More than two-thirds of IT Pros are active RAAS, or at least for implementing cloud-based recovery as a service (Recovery-as-a-service,raas Interested。 ”

Companies must ask themselves whether there are currently no virtualization systems, revisit the usefulness of recovery services, or whether they can assume workloads with cost-effective public clouds and mixed clouds to proactively improve their RTO and RPO policies.

(Responsible editor: Fumingli)