RTO vs. RPO: Why Recovery Objectives Matter for IT Success

Businesses are aware that IT downtime will cost more.

Businesses must consider the implications of downtime and focus on maintaining continuity of their business operations. To do this, a proper business continuity plan must be implemented to enable them to minimize downtime or avoid it altogether. In this way, companies can ensure the resilience of their IT infrastructure.

When you talk about business downtime, you often hear about recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). It is essential that every business has a complete understanding of RTO and RPO to ensure rapid recovery from a disaster.

RTO vs RPO – What is the difference?

RTO is the desired downtime limit after a disaster, indicating how quickly systems should be restored. While RPO is the acceptable limit of data loss, indicating the amount of data a system can afford to lose.

Choosing the right disaster recovery software as a service (DRaaS) allows businesses to implement powerful solutions that meet their RTO and RPO goals with minimal data loss.

In this article, we'll explain how to measure RTO and RPO, the role of these metrics in a backup business continuity plan, and how to set and achieve your company's RTO and RPO goals. What is the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)?

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is a key metric that helps you calculate how quickly a system or application should be recovered after a downtime so that there is no disruption. significant impact on business operations. In short, RTO is the measure of how much downtime you can tolerate.

In the event of unexpected failures, one or two systems may fail and you will face downtime until the problem is resolved. This puts you in a situation where you need to determine the time frame within which you need to restore the system so that your business operations are not disrupted. This is where the RTO comes into play.

Setting the RTO involves understanding each system's downtime tolerance, and for each of your applications you will likely have different RTOs. Once you have defined the RTO metric, you are ready to plan a recovery that includes the recovery strategy and technology you need for successful and rapid recovery from downtime.

What is Recovery Point Objective (RPO)?

A Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is a measurement you set for the amount of data loss your business can sustain and continue to operate without any effect on its business operations.

To determine the RPO, you need to assess the criticality of the data to know if you need to recover all the data or some of it. There may even be data that is relatively less important and does not need to be recovered. be restored. Based on this, you will be able to define the RPO for your system: the higher the data criticality, the lower the RPO value should be.

Determining the RPO is an essential part of a backup plan, as it helps you define how often you want to back up your data based on its criticality.

Differences between RTO and RPO

RTO and RPO are important elements associated with backup and disaster recovery plans. RTO and RPO are defined and measured in units of time. Although RTO and RPO may look similar, there are a few key differences:

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Related to tolerable downtime until recovery.

Related to tolerable data loss.

Linked to the time required for restoration.

Linked to the backup frequency.

Linked to the restoration of...