
RTO is concerned with systems and applications, meaning its calculation deals more with time limitations on application downtime than data recovery. Near-zero RPO and RTO for all applications are very costly, as the only way to ensure no lost data and 100 percent uptime is by ensuring continuous data replication inside failover virtual environments.ĭue to the cost of a near-zero RPO, prioritize data and applications to match the expense of achieving the right RPO and RTO based on purpose, risk, and costs. Only business disruption and disaster rehearsals can expose these actuals.Īs mentioned above, RPOs and RTOs will differ based on application and data priority. Recovery time actual (RTA) and recovery point actual (RPA) are always the elapsed time and lost data of an actual recovery process and are often different from these objectives. RTO represents how much real time that can pass before the interruption impedes the flow of normal business operations unacceptably. The RTO answers the question: “How much time after notification about the business process disruption should it take to resume normal operations?”Īnother way to think about the difference between recovery time objective and recovery point objective is that RPO represents a changing amount of data that will require re-entry or may be lost during network downtime. The recovery time objective (RTO) is the amount of real time a business has to restore its processes at an acceptable service level after a disaster to avoid intolerable consequences associated with the disruption. In other words, recovery point objectives of a recovery plan specify the last point in time the IT team could achieve tolerable business recovery processing given how much data will be lost during that interval. If the RPO for this business is 12 hours and the last good copy of data available is from 10 hours ago, we are still within the RPO’s parameters for this business continuity plan. The recovery point objective (RPO) describes the amount of time that can pass during an event before data loss exceeds that tolerance.Įxample: An outage occurs. These objectives can guide the selection of an optimal data backup plan, as well as offer bases for identifying and analyzing viable strategies which could enable the enterprise to resume business processes within a timeframe at or near the RPO and RTO.Īlthough these two terms are related, it is important to understand the difference between them.Įvery BCP sets forth a maximum allowable tolerance or threshold for data loss during a disruption.

Recovery point objective and recovery time objective (RTO) are among a data protection or disaster recovery plan’s most important parameters.
