Defining Your Recovery Objectives – Business Continuity is King
Posted by Matt Law on November 10, 2009
Matt Law
With huge business impacts and negative publicity looming behind any type of e-mail outage, the impact becomes more significant. Exchange downtime and data loss can occur on many different levels with greatly varying degrees of probability. The fact of the matter is that e-mail interruptions are inherently unavoidable. Also, more often that not the “most manageable – quick fix” of interruptions snowball into much bigger issues that require days and sometimes weeks to fully resolve. No matter the size of the outage, it is important to realize the impact of the event, what it involved and, most importantly, how to handle the situation the next time it happens. This requires IT organizations to look closely at whether or not their current Exchange data protection technologies and processes are sufficient to meet the fast and often granular recovery needs of their organization.
The first step to any adequate protection for e-mail systems is identifying what is best for a particular environment. Most companies rely on Microsoft Exchange Server, which leads to a particular data protection approach with specific criteria. Data protection for Microsoft Exchange is driven by two user requirements: recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) ― the speed by which you are able to recover and resume minute-to-minute operations, as well as the age of the Exchange data recovered.
When weighing Exchange data protection options, such as traditional backups to tape or disk, snapshots, replication or real-time continuous protection, IT managers must first have a crystal clear understanding as to the expectations of their organization surrounding Exchange recoverability – as well as the availability. Is Exchange truly business critical in that it’s closely tied to their organization’s ability to generate revenue and provide high levels of customer service? What do their users expect in terms of RPOs and RTOs? What are the demands of regulatory agencies and the associated compliance requirements?
Once you have answered these questions and implement a reliable data protection strategy for your e-mail system, you will be armed with the ability to bring your business back on the grid when an unexpected event occurs. It is difficult to know just how stranded you would feel without having experienced a failure, but it is not difficult to look ahead, be prepared and empower your business.
