How to Establish Effective RPO and RTO for Your Business

If you want your business to succeed, you’ll need to make sure you have a data backup solution in place. Additionally, this data backup solution needs to have two specific metrics nailed down: recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Let’s discuss what these metrics mean and why they are so important for data recovery.

There are different perspectives you have that will contribute to your success with RTO and RPO standards. Let’s go over them.

RTO and RPO Identify Specific Points of No Return

To establish some context, your recovery point objective and recovery time objective are used in a worst-case scenario to get your business back in a functional state with minimal data loss and downtime. As you can imagine, there is a fine line that you cannot cross, and RPO and RTO establish this boundary.

Your business will likely place different values on its data according to what is most helpful and most impactful for your operations. It’s up to you to establish these values so you can make effective judgment calls throughout the recovery process.

For example, let’s say you have to go five hours without access to your company email so you can instead focus your efforts on recovering data for other parts of your business. In a circumstance like this, your RTO would be five hours. If you could only lose two hours worth of data at the absolute max, then your RPO would be two hours.

How to Measure Your RTO and RPO

There are a few steps that contribute to this calculation.

It’s important to know just how much downtime actually costs your business. To make this calculator, follow this formula:

First, consider how your business generates revenue. What are the processes involved that contribute to your income? What would it take to keep them running?

The next step is figuring out how much productivity you are losing. Look at the downtime event and determine how many users cannot work properly under its circumstances, what the impact to their productivity is in terms of a percentage, their average hourly salary, and the length of the downtime event. Multiply all of this together. This should give you a rough estimate of what this downtime would cost your business. You can then use this information to calculate your RTO and project an RPO that makes sense.

Of course, there is room for even more information and context as needed. You can include certain systems and assign them a greater value according to how much they are really used, as well as your business’ specific requirements. Ultimately, your business is unique, so its circumstances will also be unique in the event of any disaster scenario.

Let Us Help You Through This Process

BNMC can help your business determine RPO and RTO. You can then use these details to make more educated decisions about the viability of your business continuity. To learn more, call us at (978) 482-2020 today.