Incidents such as hardware failures and cyberattacks can slow or completely halt business operations. When they hit your organization, your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) can be the difference between resuming operations swiftly and facing a major crisis due to prolonged downtime and extensive data loss.
This guide explains the meaning of RTO and how it differs from RPO. You’ll also learn how to define recovery time objective and RPO targets step by step in your business continuity and disaster recovery plan.
RTO vs RPO Explained and How They Support Business Continuity
When critical business workloads (the data, apps, processes and network operations that an organization can’t operate without) are affected by an IT incident, two main questions come to mind: How long will recovery take? And how much data have we lost? That’s where RTO and RPO metrics come in.
Understanding RTO Meaning
Recovery time objective is the target time to restore business operations after a disaster. It’s basically the “deadline” for getting an unavailable system back up and running before the unavailability becomes unacceptable. RTO sets the maximum amount of downtime a business can tolerate and determines how quickly you must restore data and workloads from backups.
For example, if your RTO for a system is 30 minutes, it means your company can only afford to have that system offline for half an hour. If restoring operations takes longer than that, the prolonged downtime can start causing serious problems, such as frustrated customers and lost revenue.
An organization can set a system’s RTO in seconds, minutes, hours or days, depending on how critical the system is in running daily business operations. By establishing the time limit for restoring systems to maintain essential business operations during and after a disruption, RTO supports effective business continuity planning.
What Is RPO?
A recovery point objective is the maximum amount of data, measured in time, that an organization can afford to lose after a disruptive event. RPO determines how frequently a company backs up data to reduce data loss in the event of an incident.
For example, a business with a 60-minute RPO backs up its data at least once every hour. That means if a server crashes at 1:59 PM, the organization can restore everything up to 1:00 p.m. of that day. Any data between 1:00 p.m and 1:59 p.m. would be lost. In short, the company risks losing no more than one hour of data in an IT incident, which promotes business continuity.
Like RTO, RPO can be measured in seconds, minutes, hours or days based on how important a system’s data is to business operations.
How To Set RTO Targets for Critical Systems and Define RPO Goals in a Business Continuity Plan
When setting RTO and RPO, the factors you need to consider may differ, as one focuses on downtime and the other on data loss. However, businesses usually follow the same framework to define both metrics. Here’s how to determine RTO in business continuity planning and set RPO targets properly.
Step 1: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
Identify applications, data, networks and processes your business can’t operate without. Next, determine what happens if they become unavailable and whether the impact changes with time. Questions for analyzing the consequences of downtime and data loss in a particular system include:
- Does downtime or data loss for this system come with a financial cost? If so, how much per hour?
- How does the application’s downtime or data loss affect employees and customers?
- Can the system’s unavailability ruin your brand reputation?
- What compliance or regulatory requirements apply to this system?
Business continuity software like Onspring can automate BIA. The results will help you set realistic RTO and RPO targets based on business impact metrics instead of guesswork.
Step 2: Evaluate Operational Dependencies
Operational dependencies are the systems or services that another system needs to work. For example, a given application might depend on a:
- Database to store data
- Network connection to communicate with other systems
- Payment gateway to process transactions
Evaluating these dependencies shows you all the components that must be working for the application to run smoothly. This information is important in disaster recovery planning because it can determine:
- The order of restoring systems after a disaster, which in turn influences whether one system gets a shorter RTO than the other
- What data you should recover and how recent it should be to keep critical systems running and prevent errors, which influence RPO targets
Step 3: Determine Tolerance Levels
Figure out the limits of your organization’s needs. Using your BIA findings, define:
- Downtime tolerance: The longest time a system can be unavailable without causing a business crisis (RTO target)
- Data loss tolerance: How much data loss, measured in time, is acceptable for your organization (RPO target)
Lower tolerance levels mean faster recovery and less data loss. However, lower tolerance levels only make sense if your critical workloads actually depend on them. That’s because the lower your RPO and RTO targets are, the more complex and expensive it becomes to achieve them.
Step 4: Prioritize Business Workloads
Among the critical workloads you identified in the first step, identify the ones that other systems rely on and make sure they have the lowest RTO and RPO.
For example, many business processes rely on network resources such as firewalls and virtual machine monitors. By setting the lowest RTO and RPO on these network resources, you can be sure to restore them first after a disaster and then bring back the processes that depend on them.
After that, rank all systems from those with the lowest RTO and RPO targets to the ones with the highest. That bases restoration on urgency.
Step 5: Align RTO and RPO Targets With Recovery Technologies
After defining RTO and RPO objectives, the next step is making sure your backup and disaster recovery technologies can actually meet those targets. Here’s what that involves:
- RTO: Ensure your failover and recovery orchestration tools can automatically switch operations to backup systems within your RTO timeframe when primary systems go down.
- RPO: Verify that your backup and replication tools can create copies of critical data in a secondary environment as frequently as your RPO target requires.
Instead of simply trusting the RTO and RPO targets in your business continuity plan, simulate a system failure and test whether you can restore systems within those recovery objectives. Regular testing can reveal technology limitations or unrealistic expectations so organizations can adjust their recovery strategies and targets over time.
How a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) Platform Promotes Resilience
When it comes to managing risk, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) software like Onspring improves resilience and supports continuity by:
- Automating business impact analysis: The tool can map business processes, devices and dependencies to risks, policies and regulations.
- Testing RTO and RPO targets proactively: You can schedule regular reviews to identify gaps and strengthen your business resilience plan.
- Providing a centralized platform for BCDR management: You can see disruption impacts and recovery test results in one place.
- Offering advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities: AI can create BCDR plans, disaster recovery procedures and test scenarios, so your team doesn’t have to handle them manually. Because AI can make mistakes, you should always have a human team to review and approve its output.
Want to see BCDR software in action? Request a demo today to see how Onspring promotes business continuity.
