Friday, November 27, 2015

Definitions of RPO and RTO

RPO (Recovery Point Objective) refers to the amount of data at risk. It's determined by the amount of time between data protection events and reflects the amount of data that potentially could be lost during a disaster recovery. The metric is an indication of the amount of data at risk of being lost.

What does it cost for you to lose 1 hour, 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day of data? (This is the RPO)

The cost of data loss may be more important than the availability of the application. You may want to invest more in the solution to lower the RPO then to invest in the RTO. Maybe data doesn't change much over at the course of a day, so the solution here may be more simplistic. Again, the answer is not as simple as saying "no data loss."

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is related to downtime. The metric refers to the amount of time it takes to recover from a data loss event and how long it takes to return to service. RTO refers then to the amount of time the system's data is unavailable or inaccessible preventing normal service.

What does it cost for your application to be unavailable for a 1 hour, 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day? (This is the RTO)
How can you know what is a good price to pay for a DR solution if you don't know how much it costs you to be down? DR is an insurance policy for your application. You need to know how much to pay to protect the investment (your application). It's not as simple as saying "no downtime."

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