Explaining RTO and RPO and Why They're Critical to Your Business

Your business’ backup and disaster recovery preparations are an imperative part of your continued success as an organization, specifically, how they are measured by two key metrics: your recovery time objective (RTO) and your recovery point objective (RPO).

That being said, it’s critical that you are able to determine what your organization can support in terms of your recovery time and recovery point objectives… but how does one do that?

Listed below are the different perspectives to take into account as you establish your RTO and RPO standards.

RTO and RPO Establish Where the Point of No Return Lies

Just to contextualize what we mean when we reference your recovery time objective and recovery point objective, these metrics describe the worst-case scenario that you could still operate within. When it comes to your RTO, it is how long you can experience downtime before your business suffers irreparable harm, while your RPO outlines how much data you can lose before your operations become untenable.

Different elements of your business’ IT will have different values where these variables are concerned, so each will need to have these values calculated separately.

So, if you could—if circumstances dictated—last five hours without access to your company email server before your business was irreversibly harmed, your RTO for your email server would be five hours. If you could only lose two hours' worth of data at the most, you’d have an RPO of two hours.

How Can You Determine Your RTO and RPO?

There are a few steps that contribute to this calculation.

You need to figure out how much downtime costs your business in general. This process is fairly straightforward:

First, you need to establish how your business generates revenue, and the processes that specifically contribute to that monetary intake. Which of them requires your technology to be operational? Taking stock of these factors will help you with the calculations to come.

Next, you need to establish how much productivity is ultimately being lost. As you examine a downtime event, take the number of your users impacted, what the impact is on your productivity as a percentage, the average hourly salary of your employees, and how long your downtime lasted and multiply them all together. This will help you estimate the total impact that the downtime had, helping you determine what your RTO will amount to, and from there, project an RPO that will give you the information needed.

You can add more context to these measurements. For instance, certain systems experiencing downtime will have a greater impact than others, depending on your business’ requirements. Your unique business situation will dictate how your calculations turn out.

Turn to Us for Assistance in Calculating (and Mitigating) Downtime

We have the expertise and experience needed to help you estimate what downtime could do to your business… and, more importantly, help you avoid it. Reach out to Macro Systems at 703-359-9211 to learn more.