What is the Importance of RTO and RPO in your Disaster Recovery Plan

Backup & Disaster Recovery

ITIC carried out a survey in 2021 to estimate the hourly cost of downtime. A single hour of downtime that knocks mission-critical server hardware and apps offline costs, on average, between $1 million and $5 million, according to 91% of respondents. This is because of lost revenue, interruptions to work, and corrective actions.

In the event of a disaster, your organization may suffer from downtime, which can compromise critical data and cause operations to be disrupted. Improving the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of your Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is the key to reducing its impact on your business.

What is DRP?

A DRP or Disaster Recovery Plan provides a structured approach to help you prevent, prepare for, and mitigate disruption to your business.

Both natural and man-made disasters can affect your organization. Floods, earthquakes, and landslides are a few natural disasters. We can classify fire accidents, ransomware attacks, or power outages as man-made disasters.

DRP helps protect your employees, customers, and assets. It reduces downtime and financial losses. With a proper DRP, your business can withstand a crisis and resume operations as soon as possible.

What is RTO and Why is it Important?

The Recovery Time Objective or RTO outlines how rapidly an organization should bounce back from a disaster. Based on the importance and effect of the systems and services on business operations, they need to be restored first.

Your DRP team should set up RTO with the intention of reducing service interruptions and downtime.

Three things to consider for RTO:

1. How much downtime is reasonable for your organization?

2. How much will it cost you to restore systems and applications?

3. What steps must you take to ensure a complete restoration?

For instance, if you establish that your RTO is twelve hours, it implies that your organization can function for 12 hours without any of its infrastructure or data.

Your company may suffer permanent damage if you are unable to restore your data and infrastructure to normal within this time.

What is RPO and Why is it Important?

RPO is the longest period of time you can afford to lose data without having a negative impact on your organization. Data loss that exceeds RPO might be detrimental to your organization.

It specifies how often data should be backed up as well as how soon those backups must be recovered in the event of a disruption.

For instance, if your RPO is two hours, if a disaster strikes, you should plan your backups to occur every hour.

For RPO, consider these three questions:

1. How frequently do you update or modify important data for your company?
2. How frequently do you perform backups?
3. How much of your storage is set aside for backups?

How to Calculate RTO and RPO

Calculating your RPO and RTO is not a one-size-fits-all process. The RTO and RPO of your organization depend on several variables, like:

• Your organization's objectives
• Industry standards
• Customer expectations
• Data value
• Risk tolerance

A business impact analysis (BIA) is a general approach you can start with. It identifies your key data and processes, evaluates the possible ramifications of a disaster, and calculates the acceptable levels of data loss and delay.

Improve your RTO and RPO with Fourth Dimension Technologies:

Determining RTO and RPO can help you better handle a crisis and reduce the adverse effects of downtime. Fourth Dimension Technologies offers an extensive business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solution that reduces downtime and prevents data loss. You can quickly recover and meet your RPO, RTO, and, most importantly, SLAs with our new approach to disaster recovery. Contact us today to learn more about our services.