Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are the two most critical components of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery(BCDR) planning. These are goals that help businesses plan a good BDCR strategy and choose the best software to protect their critical data.
What is RPO?
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is referred to as the amount of data(or work) you can afford to lose from the point in time of a critical incident to the most recent backup, so there is no significant impact on your business operations. In simple words, it defines how frequently you take backups of your critical data.
What is RTO?
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the amount of time an application or system can be down after a critical incident without causing significant damage to the business operations until they are up & running again. It is also defined as the time spent on restoring the business application or system from the most recently available backup after a data loss or disaster.
Understanding RPO & RTO
To understand both the parameters better, let’s assume you have a custom-built CRM application that is being used by all the members of your support team to provide a seamless experience to your customers.
You cannot afford more than 60 minutes of data loss with the CRM application, and the customer support team not being available for more than 90 minutes may create reputational damage to your business.
In the above example, the RPO and RTO are 60 Minutes and 90 minutes respectively.
Defining RPO & RTO
We have just seen the RPO & RTO of a customer support system. You must be having various applications & systems, the RTO & RTO of these systems differ based on their criticality. The input from the lead members of each team will help you understand the complete working of the system.
It is not a good idea to set a common RPO for all the workload in your environment. Most of the time it might increase the network & storage overheads and reduces the overall efficiency.
Below are some of the factors you should consider when defining the RPO & RTO for each & every system,
- The maximum amount of data you can afford to loose
- Criticality of the system
- Revenue & reputation loss due to one such outage
- Data storage location
- Local & international data protection compliances
- The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) includes hardware, backup software, training & maintenance
Reducing RTO and RPO
As your business grows, the RTO & RPO of the various systems, application, or process changes. It is a good practice to periodically revisit the RPO & RTO and modify them to achieve a lesser RPO & RTO.
You can reduce the RPO by increasing the frequency of the backups. A good backups software applies very less load on the targets using an advanced changed block tracking mechanism to efficiently back up the critical systems.
RTO can be reduced by choosing a backup & DR software that allows you to instantly recover the data in whichever form you want it. It can be booting the entire system virtually, or granularly recovering the application date or files & folders.
Protect your data center with BDRSuite
Business continuity & disaster recovery are crucial for any business, no matter how large or small your business is or what operations you are doing. BDRSuite is a complete Backup & Disaster Recovery solution for Virtual, Physical, Cloud workloads & SaaS Applications and helps you easily meet your RTO and RPO goals.
Download the 30 days free trial now, or schedule a demo to learn more about how BDRSuite help protect your business data from data loss & disasters.
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