Last week, I met up with several other Church IT guys from the Atlanta area for a discussion on Information Lifecycle Management and backup with Veristor.  We raised a lot of questions and white boarded a pretty scary diagram of how data gets archived and backed up.

In the end, we determined that we need to identify a couple of key time frames:

• RPO, or Recovery Point Objective:  How much data can we afford to lose?
• RTO, or Recovery Time Objective:  How long can we wait to have our data back online?

This is going to take a lot of work from various departments, but I’ve got some initial thoughts.  First, what are our critical apps?  For us, they would be email - communication between our staff and members is critical.  Next would be our Accounting, Payroll, and Membership systems, which are all handled by the same app (Shelby).

So, how long can we be without them?  And what is reasonable given a limited budget?  As much as I’d like to say we can’t lose any data and we need to be back online 10 minutes after a disaster, that is simply not reasonably due to limited financial resources.  We probably could lose a day or so of data on the email and accounting systems and still survive.  Maybe a week on file shares and everything else.  A recovery time of 2 days for account and 1 week on everything else is probably reasonable.

I’ll be evaluating this further, as well as talking to other departments to develop some concrete objects so that we can get a better DR plan in place.