When discussing disaster recovery, it’s important to take your business’ continuity plan into consideration. Backup and recovery processes are a critical part of any application infrastructure.

A well-tested backup and recovery system can be the difference between a minor outage and the end of your business.

You will want to take three things into consideration when planning your disaster recovery strategy: recovery time objective, recovery point objective and risk mitigation.

Recovery time objective (RTO) is how long it takes to restore your backups. Recovery point objective (RPO) is what point in time you want to recover (in other words, how much data you can afford to lose after recovery). Finally, you need to understand what risks you are trying to mitigate. Risks to your data include (but are not limited to) bad actors, data corruption, user error, host failure and data center failure.