Recovery

Stage three......Recovery Time Objective

We provide a detailed recovery plan to restore the outage which includes notification, trouble ticket resolution and escalation process and procedures.

What does recovery time objective (RTO) mean exactly?  We find this acronym in just about every discussion, brochure or write-up about backup products or storage arrays. Many IT folks mistakenly think it refers to the time it takes to restore a system, an application and its data. That's not a RTO, that is reality and very often the recovery time objective and reality are miles apart.

The recovery time objective, as its full name implies, is a goal or an ideal time in which you need a specific function or service to be available following an interruption. In essence, the RTO represents the maximum amount of time before an organization is negatively impacted by the interruption of one of its core business processes or functions. For this reason, the task of establishing the recovery time objective must start at the business level and not the systems level.

Because of the complexities of recovering a telecommunications network, it is important to have a prior recovery plan in place that ensures you are protected if and when a disaster occurs.

Senior management often underestimates the complexities of a network outage. As with most recovery efforts, it is important that key members of the organization understand critical functions and need to ensure they have planned appropriately from a budgeting and recovery time perspective and per disaster.

A wide area network recovery plan is a vital component of an organization's overall business continuity plan, but possibly an overlooked one. Bringing remote users back online, along with the data centers they connect to, should be high on a WAN engineer's list of priorities.

The recovery plan does not stop at defining the resources or processes that need to be in place to recover from a disaster. The plan will also define how to restore operations to a normal state once the disaster's effects are mitigated. Finally, ongoing procedures for testing and improving the effectiveness of the recovery time objective are part of a good overall disaster recovery plan.

In its full context, the focus of a recovery time objective is to restore the operability of systems that support mission-critical and critical business processes. The objective is for the organization to return to normal operations as soon as possible.

Recovery Time Objective works in tandem with our Network Impact Analysis, Risk Assessment and Phase two.