Modern business leaders know that downtime is expensive. Every minute that a mission-critical system is down is costly. Unavailable systems negatively affect operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. One of an IT team’s most crucial responsibilities is to quickly recover systems within a predetermined time frame to minimize business damage.
Company decision-makers typically work with their IT teams and application owners to define Recovery Time Objective (RTOs) for production systems. The RTO defines the maximum acceptable downtime after a disruption or outage. Teams define RTOs based on the time required to detect the failure, decide to fail over, and restore service. The restoration may involve recovering systems, network access, and data.
The direct relationship between outages and financial losses makes it vital to reduce RTOs. Companies can take many measures to decrease recovery time and restore system availability. In an ideal world, organizations could afford to implement an active-active IT environment to ensure continuous availability with multiple, synchronized sites. This approach is expensive, but it results in near-immediate failover and minimal data loss.
The fiscal realities of running a business put this strategy out of reach for many companies. They need to adopt more cost-effective methods of reducing their RTOs. Fortunately, they have multiple options available that can meet their business objectives without breaking the IT budget.
Cost-Effective Ways to Reduce RTOs
Organizations don’t need to focus on adding more infrastructure to minimize RTOs. They can significantly reduce recovery time by simplifying the IT architecture, automating processes, and implementing intelligent redundancy rather than full system duplication. Decision-makers should consider the following tactics that can substantially reduce RTOs.
Decrease the recovery scope
Most companies do not need to restore everything, even in the event of a catastrophic disaster affecting the entire environment. The first step in reducing environment-wide RTOs is to minimize the recovery scope as much as possible. A smaller scope typically leads to faster recovery.
Teams need to categorize systems into tiers with different RTOs. Most companies should have at least three tiers, though they may want more to manage system recoveries more granularly.
- Tier 1 includes systems and infrastructure components that must be recovered immediately to restore business-critical internal and external processes. These systems should have the most stringent RTOs.
- Tier 2 includes supplemental production systems that support the business but are not required for streamlined business continuity. They can be recovered after all Tier 1 recoveries are complete and can have less rigorous RTOs.
- Tier 3 comprises test and development systems that are nice to have, but do not directly impact business operations. These systems can be recovered at the company’s discretion once all production infrastructure has been restored, with highly variable RTOs.
Automate failover procedures
Problems with manual recovery processes can lead to extended recovery times, making it impossible to meet or reduce RTOs. Recovery can be delayed by issues such as human error, broken communication channels, inexperience, or a lack of the necessary technical skills. Modern automation tools enable teams to automate many parts of the recovery process and substantially reduce RTOs.
Companies can migrate runbooks to automation scripts and automate essential tasks such as making DNS changes based on health checks to trigger failover. Effective automation can reduce RTOs from hours to minutes, supporting business continuity without requiring additional hardware.
Simplify the IT architecture
Complex systems with multiple dependencies present significant recovery challenges. The failure of an essential component or service can disrupt a business-critical system. For example, the outage of a shared storage array or authentication service can affect multiple applications. Companies should reduce interdependencies when possible and make business processes more self-contained.
Organizations can implement cloud-native microservices to add resilience to business processes. This strategy requires re-architecting existing applications but results in greater scalability, flexibility, and fault tolerance. Companies can reduce RTOs by leveraging the redundancy, automation, and automatic failover available in cloud environments.
Minimize detection time
Companies often overlook the importance of detection time when defining their RTOs. It’s impossible to initiate recovery procedures when disruptions aren’t detected promptly. Systems can be down for an extended time if users are not immediately affected and health checks are not configured correctly.
Minimizing detection time directly reduces RTOs. Teams can greatly influence RTOs with real-time health checks that either generate alerts to application owners and recovery personnel or trigger automated failover and restore procedures.
Test failover and recovery procedures regularly
Teams cannot realistically assess their ability to meet RTOs without testing their procedures. Companies should schedule failover and recovery drills for all critical infrastructure. Coordinators should document the results so recovery teams can identify issues before a real incident occurs.
Periodic testing lets recovery personnel fine-tune and optimize procedures and instill the confidence that is critical in a real recovery situation, where every extra minute can be very costly.
Leverage pre-provisioned infrastructure
Companies can reduce RTOs by using pre-provisioned resources that remain idle until they are needed. The provisioning eliminates any challenge of quickly implementing the necessary infrastructure to support effective recovery. Teams can work with cloud vendors to provision a lightweight, idle environment that can be easily scaled and ready when needed. This strategy can significantly reduce RTOs from hours to minutes.
How VAST Can Help You Lower Your RTOs
VAST understands the importance of reducing your RTOs and restoring business-critical systems as soon as possible. We offer several services and solutions that can streamline your recovery activities, reduce downtime, and support business continuity. Our teams have extensive experience in helping companies implement and protect their IT infrastructure.
VAST’s Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) is built on AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery that delivers fast point-in-time recovery using affordable storage and minimal compute resources. Companies pay only for the full disaster recovery site when needed and use a unified process for testing recoveries.
We can help you modernize and transform your data center by building your environment around cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure.
Our cloud experts help plan and execute cloud migrations that focus on your business needs. We carefully assess existing workloads and determine if they are suitable for migration. Teams migrate your data securely and integrate the cloud services into your business operations.
Get in touch with VAST today and learn how we can help you reduce your RTOs without overspending.
