Skip to main content

What is the difference between Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)?


Both RTO and RPO are essential elements of business continuity, and they sound quite similar. But their purpose is quite different.

What is RTO?

So, what does RTO mean? BS 25999-2, a leading business continuity standard, defines RTO as “…target time set for resumption of product, service or activity delivery after an incident”.
This actually means that RTO is crucial when implementing business continuity in a company – calculating how quickly you need to recover will determine what kind of preparations are necessary. For example, if RTO is 2 hours, then you need to invest quite a lot of money in a disaster recovery center, telecommunications, automated systems, etc. – because you want to be able to achieve full recovery in only 2 hours. However, if your RTO is 2 weeks, then the required investment will be much lower because you will have enough time to acquire resources after an incident has occurred.
RTO is determined during the business impact analysis (BIA), and the preparations are defined in the business continuity strategy.

What is RPO?

Recovery point objective is a totally different thing – according to Wikipedia, RPO is “… the maximum tolerable period in which data might be lost”. As this is quite difficult to grasp right away, I like to use this example instead – ask yourself how much data you can afford to lose? If you are filling in a database with various kinds of information, is it tolerable to lose 1 hour of work, 2 hours or maybe 2 days? If you are writing a lengthy document, can you afford to lose 4 hours of your work, the whole day or perhaps you could bear if you lost your whole week’s job?
This number of hours or days is the RPO. Recovery Point Objective is crucial for determining one element of business continuity strategy – the frequency of backup. If your RPO is 4 hours, then you need to perform backup at least every 4 hours; every 24 hours would put you in a big danger, but if you do it every 1 hour, it might cost you too much.

So, what’s the difference between RTO and RPO?

The difference is in the purpose – RTO has a broader purpose because it sets the boundaries for your whole business continuity management, while RPO is focused solely on the issue of backup frequency. They are not directly related – you could have RTO of 24 hours and RPO of 1 hour, or RTO of 2 hours and RPO of 12 hours.
But let me emphasize what is even more important: what do RTO and RPO have in common? They are both crucial for business impact analysis and for business continuity management. Without determining them properly, you would be just guessing – and guessing is the best way to ensure you never recover from a disaster.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ghosting

Ghosting is to cease communications without notification. The use of the word "ghost" as a verb originated in social media in reference to dating, but the term is now used by employers to describe employees and potential employees who suddenly disappear. Typically, ghosting is used to describe: Job candidates who suddenly stop responding to messages. New hires who fail to show up for their first day of work. Employees who do not show up for a shift. Employees who leave work in the middle of the day and never come back. Some analysts blame ghosting on millennial entitlement. The reasoning is that members of the millennial generation have been brought up to feel they are special -- so special, in fact, that they do not need to follow conventional rules of behavior. Other analysts, however, maintain that ghosting behavior stems from changes in the job market and the phenomenon is simply a reflection of the laws of supply and demand in a healthy jo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Data deduplication

Data deduplication -- often called intelligent compression or single-instance storage -- is a process that eliminates redundant copies of data and reduces storage overhead. Data deduplication techniques ensure that only one unique instance of data is retained on storage media, such as disk, flash or tape. Redundant data blocks are replaced with a pointer to the unique data copy. In that way, data deduplication closely aligns with incremental backup, which copies only the data that has changed since the previous backup. For example, a typical email system might contain 100 instances of the same 1 megabyte (MB) file attachment. If the email platform is backed up or archived, all 100 instances are saved, requiring 100 MB of storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the attachment is stored; each subsequent instance is referenced back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 100 MB storage demand drops to 1 MB. Target vs. source deduplication Data deduplica...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a computer chip that performs rapid mathematical calculations, primarily for the purpose of rendering images. A GPU may be found integrated with a central processing unit (CPU) on the same circuit, on a graphics card or in the motherboard of a personal computer or server. In the early days of computing, the CPU performed these calculations. As more graphics-intensive applications such as AutoCAD were developed; however, their demands put strain on the CPU and degraded performance. GPUs came about as a way to offload those tasks from CPUs, freeing up their processing power. NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and ARM are some of the major players in the GPU market. GPU vs. CPU A graphics processing unit is able to render images more quickly than a central processing unit because of its parallel processing architecture, which allows it to perform multiple calculations at the same time. A single CPU does not have this capability, although multi...
Post a Comment
Read more