When it comes to backup and disaster recovery (BDR) guidance, it’s pretty common to hear discussions about your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and your Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Your RPO is essentially your decision on how much data you can afford to lose during downtime. For instance, you’ve decided you can afford to lose six hours of email or four hours of online orders.

Your RTO, on the other hand, is the maximum amount of time you want to lapse between the initial failure and your recovery. If your RTO is three hours, then your objective is to be up and running within three hours from going dark.

RTA vs. RTO

Here’s what you hear less about: your Recovery Time Actual (RTA). RTA is the actual amount of time it takes for you to recover and is the reality, not the goal set by your RTO (the objective). This is important to measure because your success or failure in matching your RTA to your RTO tells you if your backup and disaster recovery system needs help.

Why Your RTA is Lagging Behind Your RTO

Not all outages are the same, and your RTA could fluctuate depending on the solution, the type of disaster, and other factors. But whether you’ve developed an RTO for each situation or one that overrides RTO for your critical systems, you should have an accurate idea of how much time it takes you to come back to life. That tells you how effective your BDR strategies and solutions are.

If your RTA is coming up short, here are several possible reasons:

Relying on Physical Backups: You’re still relying on physical backups, and you find that you can’t keep up with your expanding data and apps – and even when you can, retrieving those offsite backups can involve traveling to distant data centers or shipping times.

Legacy System: You’re using an old-school legacy system that requires intense maintenance and manual testing as well as backup creation – and sometimes your team falls behind, putting your recovery at risk. Plus, legacy systems that doesn’t use data deduplication creates high bandwidth requirements, which put a drain on your network performance.

Inadequate Resources: Your IT infrastructure has insufficient hardware, storage, or network bandwidth, which slows down recovery times.

Multiple Vendors and Interdependencies Needed to Recover: You upgraded to a modern BDR solution but found it involves a variety of vendors and support centers for recovery, creating chaos whenever recovery goes wrong and no one seems to know whose fault it is or how to fix it. Systems with multiple BDR solutions create complex interdependencies that require more time to restore, leading to delays.

Complex to Use: Your new solution involves a dozen complex steps that require training, which slows down recovery when none of the trained staff are available.

Partial Recovery: When recovering from an outage, you can only get a few systems back online, forcing you to choose between saving sales or employee productivity.

Poorly Defined RTO: An RTO that is too aggressive or was created hastily can lead to failure in meeting it.

Untested RTO: This is one of the most common causes. When an RTO is untested, chances are the RTO and RTA has a wide gap. Without frequent testing, flaws in the recovery processes are only discovered during actual outages, which can cause extreme delays.

Closing the RTO-RTA Gap

If any of the above sound familiar, below are a few ways to speed up your RTA.

Simplify your Recovery Process. Choose a solution that’s intuitive and easy enough for anyone to failover in a time of crisis. A solution like Quorum’s one-click recovery is your friend when it comes to getting back online fast.

Choose an All-in-One Solution. Along the same theme of simplification, find a BDR vendor that either takes it all off your plate, as in a DRaaS solution, or choose a vendor that handles every aspect of BDR – no extra suppliers or complexity involved.

Go Virtual. For another level of security, partner physical backups with a virtualized mirror of your environment for a speedy offsite disaster recovery.

Leverage Cloud Resources. A cloud-based disaster recovery solution that includes on-site appliances can offer more flexibility and easier scalability compared to purely on-premise backups. As a bonus, these more contemporary frameworks can mitigate your lack of resources while being more cost-effective in most scenarios.

Create a Response Team. Your RTA is bound to hit a practical limit if your recovery processes rely on an individual to perform key recovery tasks. Sooner or later, an incident may occur where the individual you need is unavailable. This can be especially devastating if you lack the documentation needed for someone else to take over. To avoid these kinds of mishaps, you must make a point to create a team trained to recover from different scenarios should the situation arise.

Prioritize Automation. Nothing slows down recovery like discovering your backups are corrupt or outdated – or just weren’t created. Automated backups and testing features like what Quorum provides can lighten the administrative burden on your team while boosting your RTA. Automation that removes the need for humans to do the heavy lifting should help your team focus on the big-picture issues, thus speeding up your RTA.

Set Up a Tiered Recovery System. Team leaders may not want to hear or even admit it, but not all systems and data are equally critical. Before disaster strikes, the organization’s stakeholders must agree on which systems need to be prioritized for restoration to meet continuity needs, if applicable. For instance, a manufacturer would prioritize systems that can keep their assembly line moving, whereas a law firm may prioritize communications and document accessibility. This will further simplify recovery and recovery scenarios where business units are prioritized based on clout and not on the real value they provide.

Collaborate with External Experts. If your in-house team lacks expertise, consider collaborating with external BDR consultants or MSPs to review your strategies. External experts may be less burdened by biases, and they may have the most up-to-date experiences from other clients and industries that may help you close the RTO and RTA gap.

Set Up Testing Environments. If you haven’t done so already, you’ll want to set up a test environment, like the Clean Room Test Network that Quorum provides, so that you can run recovery tests without impacting live systems. Regularly testing in these environments will also help provide a baseline for success when optimizing your RTA, troubleshoot ransomware attacks, and help prevent faulty patches from taking down your systems like what happened to CrowdStrike.

Keep Testing Your Disaster Recovery Plan. The best way to close the gap between your RTA and your RTO is to keep testing your plan and find out where the weaknesses are. On each test, consider these three key questions at the very least:

• Is the team unclear on what they should do?
• Have you identified the most likely risks and implemented the right security and recovery measures?
• Are you prioritizing critical systems and data through tiered recovery?

Regular tabletop exercises and run-throughs are the best ways to continually identify and correct the stumbling blocks that inhibit a speedy recovery. Once you have these down, you will eventually get your RTA closer to your RTO.

Final Thoughts

When evaluating solutions, ensure the clone environments run as fast as your normal environments. Lags and limitations can cancel out even a rapid RTA. Thus, make sure your replica will perform with the same speed and smoothness users are used to. That is why, at Quorum, we’re laser-focused on the performance of our appliances. In fact, our appliance are so fast that when clients failed over to our appliance, their users didn’t even notice any difference.

With our Quorum onQ, recovery time is only 5 minutes. A single appliance can have up to 8,000,000 IOPs. Our scalable hardware is designed to deliver the same levels of workload performance as your production systems and seamlessly take over from the compromised server.

See how Quorum can help you close the RTO and RTA gap. Get a demo now.