Understanding the role of RTO and RPO in disaster recovery scenarios

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Disasters—from hurricanes to human errors to cyber or ransomware attacks—can strike anytime. IT teams architect disaster recovery (DR) plans to mitigate the impact of these risks by minimizing downtime and ensuring their critical applications and operations can be quickly restored. These plans typically include both the time and their acceptable amount of data loss threshold, measured in time until recovery occurs.

As part of a robust DR plan, a realistic recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) help ensure business continuity. RTO in the plan represents the time in the future when the disrupted application or service will be operational again. Essentially, it’s a target time set for the recovery of IT and business activities after a disaster. RPO represents the amount of data that can be lost or need to be re-entered or reconstructed in the event of a disaster or system failure without causing significant harm to the business. In this case, the RPO would be from the last time the organization performed a backup before the disaster. Low RTOs and RPOs are best for businesses.

RTO vs. RPO explained

Enterprises can assess IT resilience by recovery time and recovery point objective (RTO/RPO) metrics.

These metrics are crucial in disaster recovery planning. RTO is the time from failure to fix—the maximum amount of acceptable time until systems, applications, or networks are functional again. This can be a system failure, an outage caused by ransomware or other cyber threats, natural disasters, or human errors.

Correspondingly, RPO is the time between the bust and the last backup—the maximum acceptable amount of data loss an organization can tolerate from a disruptive event to its last backup before the business experiences significant harm. RPO is also measured in time.

Organizations want RPOs and RTOs as low as possible to keep customer and employee satisfaction levels high.

What is recovery time objective (RTO)?

Important to every enterprise DR plan, the recovery time objective (RTO) is the organization’s agreed-upon maximum time an application can be offline after an incident.

Because digital business moves fast, teams typically measure RTOs in seconds, minutes, and hours, rather than days as the outer limits of acceptable time in the future before restoring digital functionality to an application, service, or data.

The pandemic drove new consumers to online shopping sites. For retailers to keep these customers happy, target RTOs of many retailers’ e-commerce systems, for example, need to be seconds. That means if a retail payment system goes down, the retailers’ IT team has just two or three seconds to get it back to operational.

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What is recovery point objective (RPO)?

Recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data loss an application can tolerate before the business is negatively affected. RPO is dependent on an organization’s backup infrastructure schedule and reliability because backups determine the point in time to which data can be restored.

Data loss management is increasingly challenging for enterprises due to negative impacts on employee productivity, customer loyalty, and compliance reporting as part of regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. Depending on the organization’s core business, RPO—measured in time increments of seconds, minutes, hours, or even days— tracks the period elapsed between the last data backup and outage.

A healthcare organization, for example, likely wants data backups to occur regularly so that it can access its current patient information. Should an outage happen, if the most recent data backup was one hour ago, the RPO is an hour.

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What is the difference between RTO and RPO?

Although they are both time-based metrics, RTO and RPO measure different goals. RTO is the maximum tolerable time a digital app or service can be down after a disaster. RPO is the maximum amount of data loss a digital app or service can tolerate between backups before negatively affecting the enterprise. Because they are separate measures, one metric does not have to be higher or lower than the other, but the RPO metric is crucial for determining the frequency of backups.

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Why are RTO and RPO important metrics for disaster recovery?

RPO and RTO are not only key disaster recovery metrics but are becoming key business goals because digital business success depends on highly available apps and services. RTO and RPO are important metrics for DR because they:

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Boost data and disaster recovery (DR) planning effectiveness

Should a disaster strike, organizations must know in advance how much time and data loss they can tolerate before experiencing a catastrophic outcome. Calculating RTO and RPO well ahead of an outage gives organizations guidelines that realistically safeguard their data and reputations.

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Empower teams to identify and protect tier 1 applications quickly

Apps are the lifeblood of digital businesses, making it imperative that teams know which to prioritize should the business encounter a natural disaster or cyberattack. Efficient RTO and RPO times empower teams to maintain business continuity.

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Help line-of-business and IT professionals establish SLAs

IT teams calculate RTO and RPO metrics goals to ensure their promises to deliver a certain level of system uptime or quality to lines of business and partners are doable.

Common types of backups used to meet RTO and RPO goals

Data loss can severely interrupt operations and even cause businesses to fail. The following are among the most common types of backups organizations use to meet RTO and RPO goals:

Organizations committed to 3-2-1 backup create at least three copies of data for backups. Two copies are stored onsite (on different media), and one is stored offsite. This helps prevent any single point of failure to mission-critical data which strengthens business continuity.

Teams can also boost their DR plans with immutable snapshots, which are gold copies of backup data never exposed to other systems nor mounted externally.

Organizations investing in cloud backup keep their data safe and accessible in case of disruption by replicating and storing it in the cloud to protect it from loss or corruption. Cloud backup is synonymous with backup as a service (BaaS), which can be self-managed or fully managed by a provider. Teams may also invest in disaster recovery as a service(DRaaS), which takes advantage of the public cloud as a recovery target for failover and failback in an as-a-service consumption model.

Teams choosing hybrid cloud backup typically use a single data security and management platform to safeguard apps and workloads across cloud and onsite environments.

Cohesity and RTO/RPO in disaster recovery

Today’s digital customers are demanding and willing to take their loyalties elsewhere if products and services aren’t available and don’t perform satisfactorily. That has many enterprises re-evaluating their disaster recovery (DR) plans to ensure recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) are as close to zero as possible—in an ideal scenario, minutes or seconds, rather than hours or days.

Significant investments in legacy data protection and DR products have failed to stop downtime—some of it preventable—causing businesses to lose revenue and confidence in their brands, slow productivity, and become subject to compliance financial penalties. Attempting to use these same legacy solutions to reduce RTO and RPO is a losing DR strategy for organizations.

Cohesity delivers AI-powered data security and management. Cohesity makes it easy to secure, protect, manage, and get value from data—across the data center, edge, and cloud. Cohesity helps organizations defend against cybersecurity threats with comprehensive data security and management capabilities, including immutable backup snapshots, AI-based threat detection, monitoring for malicious behavior, and rapid recovery at scale, boosting business continuity and cyber resilience. The Cohesity Data Cloud unifies end-to-end data protection infrastructure—including target storage, backup, replication, disaster recovery, and cloud tiering—reducing attack surfaces, lowering costs, and minimizing risk. Moreover, Cohesity streamlines operations with AI/ML-powered insights and Zero Trust security that helps defend against ransomware and other internal and external threats that lead to downtime.

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