Disaster Recovery Planning: RTO & RPO

Designing the architecture for any disaster recovery solution starts with understanding your data recovery requirements. And while every business would like the most comprehensive plan available, it’s not always cost effective. That means making decisions based on which applications you can least afford to go without.

Your data recovery time objectives (RTO) focus on the length of time you have – as stated in your service level agreement (SLA) – to get an application operational after a failure.

Your recovery point objectives (RPO) focus on the amount data that can be potentially lost in a failure.

Start by prioritizing critical applications with a “near zero” RTO/RPO timeframe. These are usually the same applications that require the most IT supports calls when they are down. These applications would also cause large losses in productivity, revenues and consumer confidence.

Knowing the RTO/RPO of your business applications will help you establish the most cost effective, appropriate disaster plan for your business.