Disaster Recovery: RTO and RPO

Recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) are two of the most important metrics of any disaster recovery plan and are measured in units of time. They deal with data loss and the recovery time for data and applications in the event of a disaster. Low RTOs and RPOs are the key to achieving IT resilience.

What is the difference between RTO and RPO?

RTOs and RPOs are service level agreement (SLA) metrics that measure the effectiveness of disaster recovery (DR). They are given in units of time (days, hours, minutes). Lower values - shorter periods - are more desirable.

RTO

stands for the expected downtime until operations, including data and application services, are back online after an outage. The RTO can be affected by many factors, including the degree of manual or automated recovery processes, for example the boot order of VMs, redirection of network traffic, consistent recovery of application stacks, etc.

RPO

measures data loss in a disaster recovery scenario. It refers to the last point in time at which a known good copy of the data is available to restore a system. The further back a recovery point lies, the more data is lost. The RPO is often determined by the data protection solution used, for example: backups, storage replication or continuous data replication.