Technology failures and natural disasters can significantly impact your business. Planning for them can be cumbersome and expensive. In a typical on-premise IT environment disaster recovery often means redundant infrastructure, backup tapes or storage area networks and a lot of IT complexity. Some businesses even build and manage duplicate data centers, specifically for disaster recovery, and those data centers sit idle the majority of the time.
The effectiveness of a disaster recovery plan is commonly measured in two ways: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RTO measures how long before users can access systems in the event of a failure. RPO measures how much of a time gap exists when the data is restored. Businesses that have invested lots of time and money in disaster recovery preparation are typically able to set RTO and RPO goals at a few hours or less for critical systems, with the cost increasing as those timeframes decrease. For other businesses that haven’t invested at that level, RTO and RPO can stretch into hours or days. And in extreme cases, if disaster strikes, some businesses just have to start over.
Google Apps offers a better way of recovering your data in case of disaster, with robust disaster recovery capabilities built right in. Google’s RPO design target is zero data loss and their RTO design target is instant failover. This means that if there is a disaster or disruption that affects one of their data centers, they are able to shift users to an alternate data center, so they can can continue working uninterrupted.
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