Recovery versus Availability
Adopt Our Availability Metrics and Transform Your IT Program
“Disaster Recovery” is quickly becoming an antiquated term as organizations move to an “always available” Information Technology environment. The metrics that have driven Information Technology for the last 40 years, are no longer valid for measuring 24×7 business process availability.
Touchstone helps organizations identify business processes and applications that need to be highly available and builds programs that leverage Availability metrics, rather than Disaster Recovery metrics.
Disaster Recovery Metrics
Recovery Time Objective – The targeted duration of time a business process must be restored after a disaster in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.
Recovery Point Objective – The age of files that must be recovered from backup for normal operations to resume if a computer, system, or network goes down as a result of a hardware, program, or communications failure.
Availability Metrics
Availability Time Objective – The time, expressed in minutes/seconds, that an application and its associated systems are available for transacting. This term replaces the disaster recovery term RTO.
Availability Point Objective – The age, expressed in minutes/seconds, of an application’s transaction data. This term replaces the disaster recovery term RPO.
Definitions
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
Determines Business Availability requirements. “If Supply Chain is down for more than 5 minutes, we will lose $8,000 per minute.”
Application Dependency Mapping
Determines up and downstream application dependencies. “The primary Supply Chain application runs on private VM clusters but gets rate and customer data from the public cloud.”
Availability Strategy
Provides the Availability Technology solution to meet the business requirements determined in the BIA. “My two data center, two region GCP, Availability Strategy helps me meet our Supply Chain business requirements.”
Business Continuity and Availability Procedures and Plans
Documents a checklist of procedures that roll-up into plans. “My Plans are collections of checklists that anyone can follow.”
Availability Test Program
Provides a measurement of actuals to the Business Objectives. “We can failover our Supply Chain application in 3 minutes, 2 minutes better than the business requirements.”