For small businesses in 2013, downtime is never an option. Disrupting your business operations for even a few hours can cause you to miss important deadlines, delay projects, waste your employees’ time, and possibly even lose a significant amount of revenue. Sometimes a network goes down due to technical problems, a faulty piece of equipment, for example. Other times, it’s caused by forces outside your control or the control of your IT services provider. A small fire in your building could cause huge problems for your IT systems if the sprinklers go off. Extended power outages can wreak havoc on your business processes, as well. And that’s not to mention natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, hurricane-force winds, and so on. For businesses large and small in 2013, it’s vitally important they create a backup and disaster recovery plan (BDR) with the help of their outsourced IT provider or managed service IT provider (MSP). Part of this planning involves setting an RTO, a recovery time objective. An RTO is the length of time a business deems it acceptable to have a particular business process offline. Shorter RTOs require more robust, instantly accessible solutions.
How does a modern backup and disaster recovery plan work?