In addition to aligning your recovery objectives to the proper technological capabilities, processes play a major role in an organization’s ability to recover with confidence. That’s why InterVision works with clients to set the most accurate expectations for stakeholders, using a concept called True RTO™ and a plan that factors in people, process and technology dependencies called Recovery Waves™.
True RTO
On a basic level, a recovery time objective (RTO) is the objective for the time it takes to recover. But there can be differing interpretations on what level of detail this actually entails.
Most IT providers define RTO from the technical perspective described above. Based on this definition, they describe having instantaneous or near-instantaneous RTO.
InterVision is dedicated to the complete recovery of our clients’ IT systems and what that means not just to IT, but to the rest of their organization and constituents. For this reason, we refer to recovery times in terms of True RTO.
True RTO is when all infrastructure and applications are running and returned to end users for use again. After all, this is the point when you’ve truly recovered. It ensures you are setting the right expectations to your business and leadership.
Recovery Waves
Similarly, Recovery Waves take into account the extent people and processes play in a complete recovery. Tiering applications by their urgency helps match business priorities to the right technology, so that every application receives the right order of attention during recovery. Recovery Waves go a step further and tier applications within each tier, so that IT teams aren’t overwhelmed during the failback process.
By waiting to begin the recovery of an application until its preceding application has been fully validated, IT can give calculated attention to each tier for a successful recovery. Organizing and recovering applications in a step-by-step manner gives a more accurate prediction to stakeholders of when your business will fully recover and return IT systems to end users. Since the technology aspects have become increasingly faster, this emphasis on people and process serves to enable more efficient recovery.
Conclusion
InterVision is the only Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provider that defines these recovery stages and incorporates them into our clients’ Disaster Recovery Playbooks, which adds assurance that all parties understand the joint objectives and their roles in the complete restoration of systems. Add True RTO and Recovery Waves to our full recovery suite of solutions and you can match the right technology to the needs of your organization.
