What are RTO and RPO?

What are RTO and RPO?

As industry leader Protera shows us, both RTO and RPO are critical benchmarks for disaster recovery plans. Recovery Time Objective is a measure of downtime application that can be accepted without negatively affecting the business. Recovery Point Objective, on the other hand, depends on the amount of data lost without causing an irreparable effect on the business. It dictates the time interval that is acceptable between backups.

Knowing the RPO and RTO clearly indicates how a business is prepared to recover from a disaster. Not all businesses can afford to set low RTO and RPO, although it is possible. Every business needs to understand RTO and RTO and learn how to calculate them for optimum recovery cost.

Experiencing a disaster in a business can be the most demoralizing this in a business. Because it’s something you cannot avoid and predict; the most important thing is how a business is prepared to recover from the disaster. That will determine whether the business will continue to operate or collapses.

RTO and RPO may seem similar, but in a real sense, they are different metrics of disaster recovery plans. Enterprises must understand these two concepts, especially those with comprehensive data recovery teams. Also, owners of various businesses should better understand these two concepts. Without proper knowledge of the two concepts, a business may end up with a strategy that may fail to deliver an effective outcome for disaster recovery. It may also end up with a strategy exceeding your budget and resources. That makes a business have financial constraints.

Differences between RTO and RPO

Although the two concepts seem similar, they have several differences in how they operate and the target objectives within a disaster recovery plan. Below are the comparisons.

Recovery Time Objective

  • Majorly emphasizes service unavailability
  • Creates acceptable downtime for services, apps, and operations
  • Prioritizes business-critical applications and allocation of resources
  • It requires looking into the future to estimate the time it may take for the servers to be up and running after the disaster

Recovery Point Objection

  • Put more focus on the loss of data
  • It requires looking back to the past to estimate the data lost from when the disaster occurred to the last backup
  • Assists in determining the frequency of data backups depending on data priority
  • Provides the acceptable amount of irretrievably lost data

How to calculate RTO

RTO should be calculated as part of your business impact analysis. However, before calculating that, there are some essential points to consider. They include the following.

  • The smallest possible time required for the recovery process
  • The level of service agreements with your customers
  • Whether your team is capable of restoring a system or not

The points of concern above will help you analyze an RTO that your IT team can meet. After considering those points of concern, you can now consider all your network, computer systems and applications to determine the potential business loss that is associated with the accessibility of each.

You can then use the above factors to calculate RTO for different groups of applications.

How to calculate RPO

RPO is also determined as part of your impact business analysis, just like RTO. The essential points to consider for the calculation of RPO include the following.

  • The available resources and the total cost of the data recovery solutions
  • The amount of data you can afford to lose
  • Your SLAs with your customers

After considering the points above, it is simple to calculate the minimum possible RPO for each business process and application. However, it is costly and consumes a lot of resources.

You can determine the allowable threshold for data loss after considering all your business functions and applications using data. Your IT team can then choose the backup frequency and place a recovery plan to ensure that a loss stays within acceptable limits.

Keeping RTO and RPO up to date

Every organization should regularly review their RTOs and RPOs to ensure they are up to date. That is because the environment and the organization can change, and any company that has outgrown its recovery plan is considered to have no recovery plan. That is why it is essential to ensure the two concepts stay current.

So What is RTO and RPO SAP?

Every business and organization experiences disaster in their daily operations. Therefore, you must understand the two concepts for your recovery from any disaster.