From: Stuart Oliver, Advanced Solutions Manager

To continue our disaster recovery blog series, I think it is important to explain a few common terms:

• Recovery Time Objective: (RTO) refers to the amount of time required to re-establish an application for end user access from the point of time where the application failed.
• Recovery Point Objective: (RPO) refers to the amount of data an application “owner” is prepared to lose.

In addition to RTO and RPO there are two other key terms that are often misunderstood and therefore incorrectly used:

• Restorable is a word used to describe an application that can only be re-built to the point of when the last available backup was completed.
• Recoverable is used to describe an application that can be re-built to the point of time when the original disaster occurred.

The key issue to understand here is that a recoverable environment is much more advantageous to a customer than a restorable solution, yet today the vast majority of organizations are still using restore centric services.

To add to the complexity, as applications have become more sophisticated ,the number of dependencies between separate systems have grown rapidly and the nature of these interconnections have also become more sensitive to failure – most mission-critical applications are interconnected to the point where they appear as one business system.

For many companies, the role of the Disaster Recovery Coordinator is rapidly reaching an end. Companies don’t want to spend monthly planning for an annual recovery test that for the most part has become irrelevant.

Therefore, companies are looking for new ways to address the availability of their critical applications. As discussed previously, the approach companies have taken to planning for disasters has quickly become obsolete as the interconnectedness between business systems has increased.

What Hosting.com did was to design a solution that addresses this interconnectivity and is backed by one of the industry’s most aggressive application-level SLAs. I invite you to take a closer look at our Critical Availability Service to see how Hosting.com is guaranteeing the availability of mission-critical applications.

Disasters on any level have always been a business threat, yet as we depend more and more on the technology and applications intertwined within our daily lives, disaster takes on a whole new meaning. So how have we come to this point? Let’s review some history for a moment.

In the mid 70’s several small backup computer facilities were established in the Midwest. In 1982 SunGard was spun off from Sun Oil as a computer services and recovery services vendor. In the early 80’s Comdisco computer leasing entered the recovery services business. Shortly thereafter both IBM and Hewlett Packard entered the market. All four of these firms (plus the 100 regional startups that were competing with them) had one thing in common – they all sold standby computing services to companies looking to avoid purchasing duplicate equipment and the associated software licenses.

In the early 80’s the term Disaster Recovery was coined to describe the services provided by these companies. Disaster Recovery was predicated on the idea that if enough geographically dispersed companies subscribed to emergency access to a particular computing platform then the overall cost of the service would be substantially less than each having their own dedicated equipment. The technology departments of the day established a new role called the Disaster Recovery Coordinator. This person’s primary job was to work with the various IT operation groups and their chosen disaster recovery vendor(s) to ensure the annual recovery tests were successful.

Disaster Recovery became officially defined as the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for the recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure on which critical applications operate.

In the early 90’s as organizations developed more sophisticated applications and work flows the Business Continuity industry began in earnest. Business Continuity was defined as the activities performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions would be available to customers, suppliers, regulators and other entities that required access to those functions. In effect, Disaster Recovery (Technology) became a subset to the Business Continuity (Organization) industry.

In the late 90’s a number of organizations began to realize that a portion of their IT infrastructure was supporting business functions that could not withstand a 48-72 hour outage. It was then that many companies started to evaluate data replication technology. Previously, data replication was the exclusive domain of financial institutions and certain government agencies but with the rapid improvements in telecommunication performance the capabilities were becoming available to a broader audience.

Since then the High Availability market has continued to mature to the point where most organizations can afford some type of highly available infrastructure for their critical application(s). Cloud computing has played a major role in making Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) available and affordable for a greater number of organizations.

Hosting.com offers Critical Availability Service (CAS) to meet the BC/DR needs for organizations of all sizes. CAS combines cloud and hybrid platform solutions, high availability managed services and a guaranteed SLA to provide you with a BC/DR infrastructure.