Recovery Time and Recovery Point Goals Explained for Business Leaders

When a key system goes down, two questions come up straight away. How long until it is working again, and how much data has been lost? Recovery planning answers both in advance with two simple targets, known as the recovery time objective and the recovery point objective. Backup platforms from vendors such as Veeam are built to meet these targets, but the targets themselves need to come from business leaders, since they reflect what the company can actually afford to lose.

The Two Terms in Plain Language

These terms appear in almost every recovery plan, and they are easy to confuse.

• Recovery time objective (RTO) is the longest a system can be down before the damage becomes unacceptable. An RTO of four hours means the system must be running again within four hours.
• Recovery point objective (RPO) is the amount of data, measured in time, that the business can afford to lose. An RPO of one hour means losing no more than the last hour of work.
• Recovery time actual is how long a recovery really takes when tested or used. Comparing it with the RTO shows whether the plan works.
• Business impact analysis is the process of working out what each system costs the business when it is unavailable.

RTO is about downtime. RPO is about data loss. A system can have a short RTO and a long RPO, or the other way around, depending on how it is used.

Why Leaders Should Set These Targets

IT teams often set recovery targets on their own, based on what current tools and budgets allow. This can leave the business exposed without anyone realising.

A finance director knows what an hour without the payment system costs. A sales head knows how much a day of lost customer orders matters. These are business judgements. IT can then design a setup that meets them and explain the cost.

When targets are set the other way round, starting from the budget, the business may find out during an outage that its most important system takes two days to restore.

How the Targets Shape the Technology

RPO decides how often data must be captured. A 24 hour RPO can be met with a nightly backup. A 15 minute RPO needs backups or snapshots every few minutes. Targets close to zero usually need continuous replication to a second site or cloud region.

RTO decides how data is brought back. Restoring a large server from backup storage can take hours. Some platforms, including Veeam, can start a backed up machine directly from backup storage so users can work while data is moved back to its main location in the background. Replicated systems at a second site can often take over within minutes.

Network speed, storage speed and the order in which systems must start all affect the real recovery time. A database usually has to be running before the applications that depend on it.