RPO (Recovery Point Objective) vs RTO (Recovery Time Objective)

Any disaster weather it is corruption of data, theft, loss or a natural disaster can take down your application and can lead to a failure.

IT needs to set some objectives based on Recovery Point and Time. We call these objectives RPO (Recovery Point Objective) vs RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

Lets talk about differences between these two.

RTO (Recovery Time Objective)

RTO Refers to how much time can a business survive with application downtime. Some businesses can survive for days with application down. Some priority applications can be down only for seconds. It is not duration of loss and recovery. The core objective here is to restore application and data.

RPO (Recovery Point Objective)

RPO refers to the most recent backup before the loss of Application. For example, if you have a 4-hour RPO for an application then you will have a maximum 4-hour gap between backup and data loss. Having a 4-hour RPO does not necessarily mean you will lose 4 hours’ worth of data. Should a word processing application go down at midnight and come up by 1:15 am, you might not have much (or any) data to lose. But if a busy application goes down at 10 am and isn’t restored until 2:00 pm, you will potentially lose 4 hours’ worth of highly valuable, perhaps irreplaceable data. In this case, arrange for more frequent backup that will let you hit your application-specific RPO.