Traditional backup systems provide a point-in-time backup. The amount of data lost is up to a day's worth; the average Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is more than 20 hours. However, with a combination of paper and electronic systems, it was possible to throw labor at the problem and recover most of the data.
In today’s integrated systems environment, with transactions generated from inside and outside the organization, any thought that data could be recovered other than automatically is an illusion. Data inconsistency means manual intervention. Loss and inconsistency of data create extreme uncertainty in customers, suppliers and the business.
The ability to recovery automatically to a consistent point with the minimum of data loss is becoming a business imperative for most intermediate and large organizations. Financial organizations are leading the way in installing systems that provide close-to-zero data loss recovery with three-node topologies. As the cost of these technologies come down over time, other industries will adopt this approach, and applications and infrastructure will be architected for close to zero data loss.
Action Item: IT executives should aggressively educate their constituents that improving RPO and avoiding data loss/data inconsistency will in general be a better investment than focusing on RTO and getting systems up faster.
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