How to Find the Right Balance Between Cost and Level of System and Application Availability

Imagine a curve that represents the amount of time it takes you to recover a mission critical system that has unexpectedly gone offline with the cost of implementing a high availability (HA) or disaster recovery (DR) solution that could make an instance of that solution available within that period of time. The closer you get to zero minutes of recovery time – that is, instantaneous recovery in response to a disaster – the higher the cost of the system capable of delivering that response. Move away from zero minutes, though, and costs drop exponentially. The question is, at what point…