Every company wants to reach the Holy Grail of availability. Customers have high expectations when it comes to service availability and continuity. When your company achieves a high level of business continuity, your customers and clients remain loyal. They know your business will always be there for them.
Here are 3 best practices for you to follow.
- Set Data Synchronization to meet your RPO. Your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of time your company is willing to lose data during a major outage. The RPO gives you a benchmark to guide your solution design. If you set your RPO to 30 minutes, for example, then you may lose up to 30-minutes worth of your data. If your goal is maximum availability, you will want to set your RPO for 60 seconds or less. Set up your source and target solution so your data will not be more than 60 seconds out of sync. If your main source were to fail, you would not lose more than 60-seconds worth of data. Test your source and target switching to measure its performance and make sure it meets your RPO specifications.
- Ensure your systems are ready to meet your RTO. Your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the established maximum amount of time allowed to restore a business process to a specific service level following a disruption or disaster. If your goal is 99.999% availability, then your RTO should be set to 30 seconds or less. To make sure your system is ready to recover in the event of a disruption or disaster, you should test your target system and make certain it is ready to switch over if the source fails. You should be performing a table top exercise every 90 day and two live tests a year.
- Maximize your investment. Long gone are the days of hot standby systems due to capital constraints. Build out a Hybrid approach to your availability services not only to achieve your RTO but also achieve your business goals.
