At a squint, you’d be forgiven for thinking RTO and RPO are related to a certain robotic duo from the Star Wars saga. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on where you landed on The Last Jedi — RPO and RTO have nothing to do with the galaxy far, far away. They do, however, form an integral part of an effective disaster recovery plan. And just like C-3PO and R2-D2 before them, RPO and RTO are indispensable to the cause. Here’s why:
Each has a very different — yet equally important — role to play in the continuity and recovery of your business operations. And since no business is immune to a data breach or system crash, it’s crucial that both are in place to manage and mitigate risk.
What is RTO?
RTO (Recovery Time Objective) analyses business-wide systems and processes. After an outage, RTO is the timeframe your IT and operations need to be up-and-running to avoid costly losses. While 15 minutes is considered best practice, the amount of time you budget for is entirely dependant on your industry and the services you provide. For example:
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Because their bread and butter is online transaction, an eCommerce retailer would need to have their systems restored within an hour to avoid huge losses and reputational damage.
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On the flipside, brick-and-mortar merchants could get away with working manually for an extended period of time while their servers and systems are repaired.
Essentially, it boils down to how long your business can afford to have its systems out of service. The shorter the downtime, the higher the budget and the more advanced the disaster recovery and continuity plan.
What is RPO?
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) deals with data. RPO is the amount of information your business can afford to lose in the event of a disaster. Similar to RTO, it’s about determining the set amount of time between backups, as well as how much data loss your business could incur safely within that frame. Think of it this way: you’re populating a rather exhaustive website and your systems crash, undoing all of the hard work since your last save. RPO is the amount of time you can bear to repopulate the lost content.
Include both for an effective disaster recovery plan
Since different applications and processes require different treatments, a truly robust disaster recovery plan should take a multi-level approach to RTO and RPO integration. Separate applications like email and drives should each be investigated independently to establish the best methods for optimum ROI.
But even the best-laid plans can fail in the event of a disaster or breach...
DRaaS — your disaster recovery failsafe
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) replicates your entire IT environment and stores it offsite for fast recovery in the event of a disaster. It’s a solution that’s more reliable and flexible than traditional backups, allowing you to tailor your failsafe to the unique processes of your business.
All of this talk of ‘outage’ and ‘recovery’ probably has you wondering where your business scores on the disaster-readiness scale. Not to worry — we’ve planned ahead and created a handy tool to give you an accurate idea of how disaster-ready your business is. Click here to get started.
