Database Reference
In-Depth Information
ask the business to fund a solution that meets their requirements than to put together a
solution and ask the business to fund the project.
Recovery point objectives (RPOs) are tied to how much data can be lost and operations
still continue. This will vary widely within and among organizations. The RPO will
drive the availability solution applications require. For example, a database that holds
configuration information for an application may be able to sustain a 24-hour period of
data loss because the data does not change frequently, whereas a database managing
stock trades made for customer portfolios cannot lose more than one minute of data.
Many factors can drive the RPO for an application, so be sure to ask the application
owner exactly how much data can be lost.
Recovery time objectives (RTOs) determine how much time an application can be
down before it is returned to operation (brought back online). Like RPOs, this will vary
within and among organizations. The answer to this question will drive the availability
requirements for the application. For example, a database that holds patient allergy
information for the anesthesiology department cannot be down for long, because it is
important to administer the right anesthesia for patients. Therefore, the RTO for this
application may be 15 minutes.
It is important to flesh out both the RPO and RTO of an application because these are
important when it comes to making a consultative recommendation on the appropriate
availability solution. Finally, it is important that the business define an application's
RPO and RTO requirements. (Notice a theme here?) It is important that the business
dictate the SLAs, RPOs, and RTOs to IT and that IT meet these requirements. Be sure to
have a reporting mechanism in place to ensure adherence to the SLAs, RPOs, and RTOs
set forth and agreed upon.
Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery
Often we have found there to be confusion between business continuity and disaster
recovery. It is important to understand both terms. Have a business continuity plan and a
disaster recovery plan in place for your applications and your organization. This is not
meant to be an exhaustive review of business continuity and disaster recovery, but
rather an overview.
Business Continuity
Business continuity is the planning done by a company to ensure their critical business
functions remain operational or can resume shortly after some sort of service
interruption, whether minor or major. An example of a minor outage would be the loss
of a motherboard inside a physical server. An example of a major outage would be the
loss of a data center due to a natural disaster. What goes into developing the business
continuity plans are business impact analysis (BIA) studies to understand the impact
