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Right-Size SLAs

BriannaFischer
Level 1
Employee

When buying a TV nowadays, there are a million options. What size do you want? Do you want 4k? What refresh rate do you need? You also have to consider how you will use the TV. Will it be used for streaming and watching movies, or will you also use it for gaming? If you're a person who only watches the news in the morning, don't break the bank investing in a top of the line 4K TV. However, if you're an avid gamer who spends every free moment staring into the abyss of your TV, consider splurging on the best. Your eyes will thank you. 

We can apply the same principals to your disaster recovery strategy. When determining what solutions can satisfy the various recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RTO) in your organization, know that it's not a one size fits all approach. 

Outages

Why do you need a disaster recovery strategy, you ask? Great question! To be blunt: Life happens, servers go down, and Jerry "accidentally" (Or intentionally – I don't know who works for you.) spills his coffee on the brand-new network switch. The point is, you could go down at any moment. You hope for the best but always prepare for the worst. 

Just a few months ago, Slack, an enterprise-grade instant messaging platform, experienced issues when its servers became unavailable. This outage caused delays and malfunctions across the notifications services, messaging, post/files, calls, search, apps/integrations/API, and the list goes on. The outage lasted several hours, leaving customers without access to their precious messaging platform. Because Slack is mostly an online service, this outage, along with several others reported, posed a significant risk. The company ultimately paid out $8.2 million in credits to customers for service-level disruptions (Source: CNBC). Ouch. 

Just in the last few months, Google Nest experienced a 16-hour outage where users were unable to access their indoor, outdoor, and doorbell cameras. A scheduled storage server software update that "didn't go as intended" was the cause of the downtime (Source: The Verge). Customers took to Twitter to share incidents that had occurred during the outage, such as break-ins that were unable to be seen without their recording library. 

Both of the outages outlined above involve enterprise companies who experienced severe and unexpected consequences due to downtime. You might need Google level resiliency, or you might not. The point is, you need to be able to ensure recovery to limit downtime and the overall impact of an outage. You need to balance your protection strategy with overall risk tolerance. And inevitably, how much you're willing to spend will play a role in deciding which approach you take.

 Right-Sized Recovery

Veritas understands the need for right-sized recovery. Not all businesses have the same RTO and RPO requirements. These requirements will vary depending on the size and nature of the company. The questions you need to answer are how much data you can afford to lose and what is the acceptable downtime you can withstand before recovery? The answers to those questions will help you form the RPO and RTO strategy that best fits your business needs. 

If you need a more affordable solution, and your disaster recovery strategy can withstand a longer recovery time, point in time copies of your data is the way to go. If you're looking for a solution with a shorter recovery point objective and a variable recovery time objective, replication between your primary site and a secondary location (virtual or cloud) might be the best option. And if you require near-zero RTO and RPO with high availability, you need a solution that can monitor IT resources to detect business service failures instantaneously and failover to the most optimal target within the cluster. 

While it seems there are a million TVs you can choose from, thankfully, there is one clear choice in solutions to meet your RPO and RTO requirements. With the Veritas Enterprise Data Services Platform, you can tie the right dollar amount to the right SLA with options between backup, replication, and high availability. Whatever your needs may be, Veritas is here to help keep you up and running so you can focus on what matters – ensuring your customers are happy and your business is moving forward.