Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives are the foundation of every disaster recovery plan to minimize essential data loss, maximize productivity, and to ensure uptime. All organizations are at risk of facing disaster, whether its ransomware, human error, natural disaster, etc. The need for a thorough Disaster Recovery Plan has never been more vital. Do you know exactly how much an outage could cost your business? This blog explores the difference and importance of investing in low RTO's and RPO's.
What is Recovery Time Objective?
Recovery Time Objective, or RTO, is a metric used to measure the amount of time it takes for your business operations to return to normal after an outage. With the being said, the long your RTO is, the more revenue and productivity your organizations could lose. To determine your RTO, ask yourself - how long can my business afford for operations to be down? How fast do we need operations to resume to normal?
What is Recovery Point Objective?
Recovery Point Objective, or RPO, is a metric used to measure the amount of time that has passed since your last backup, aka the point you can recover your systems to. Like RTO, the longer your RPO is, the more revenue, productivity, and critical data your organization could lose. To determine your RPO, ask yourself - how much data can we afford to lose? Your RPO indicates the time since your last backup, therefore, you would be losing all the data during that elapsed period. Some organizations conduct hundreds of transactions throughout the day, losing 24 hours of data could be detrimental to their operations.
The Risk of Downtime
Short RTO's and RPO's come with an increased investment, but the benefits outweigh the costs for many. According to Zerto's IDC IT Resilience Report, the average cost of downtime per hour across all industries and organizational sizes is $250,000 per hour. Additionally, the report stated that the collective cost of 8 hours of downtime per year to an organization is 2 million. With the increased threat of cyberattacks, specifically ransomware, many organizations do not want to gamble with their data protection investments, but the risk is not worth it - everyone is at risk of an outage; whether it's a natural disaster, unplanned outage, or ransomware.
Both RTO's and RPO's are critical to an organizations Disaster Recovery Plan, without having a goal of when operations should be up and running and knowing how much data you will lose, chaos will only continue during a disaster event. Fail over tests should be conducted at least 2 times per year. Without putting your DR plan to the test - how will you be sure it works? By testing your plan routinely, your IT team will be able to make the necessary adjustments to prepare for unplanned disasters. By producing your RTO and RPO, your business will be able to see the true cost of downtime.
In today's ever-changing threat landscape, it's more important than ever to keep RTO and RPO's as low as possible.
If interested in knowing how much money you could lose to an outage, use this downtime calculator to measure the business impact of a potential IT disaster.
