In the last few posts, we talked about how to choose the right Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) KPIs. Let’s take a quick look at how we can optimize those KPIs to meet the business goals.
We understand that metrics are how we define success and failure. And how different metrics demand different action plans.
In this post, I am going to talk about Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and how to optimize it.
Let’s get started!
How frequently do you back up your data? If you back up daily, it means the maximum RPO of 24 hours and that you can’t lose data for more than 24 hours. The easiest way to optimize this is to simply backup more often — just stay reasonable here.
Copying data over a network helps you keep multiple, up-to-date copies of your critical data. This way you can make RPO even lower without the need to backup unreasonably often. Therefore, make sure to utilize replication and re-synchronization technologies, and configure them to match the desired KPI value.
All systems have files that are more critical than the others. For instance, Oracle Database has Control Files and Redo Logs -losing which will compromise the system recoverability greatly. The solution here is multiplexing. Just have several physical copies of such files for the case one is corrupted or lost. This can be done in multiple ways, from built-in features (like with Oracle) to RAID arrays.
You should consider having one system as a backup for another identical primary system. A «Cold» system (compared to a conventional cluster/standby) means there are no services running on the standby, allowing you to get rid of the excessive costs, like compute, memory, and license. Just make sure to be able to allocate all that resources during the standby promotion. Such an approach helps you to optimize both on-prem and cloud DR solutions, as well as minimize license costs.
I’ll be creating parts 2 and 3 of this post to discuss further, to talk about other KPIs optimization soon. So, stay tuned!
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