How much downtime can your business handle? Disaster means different things to different people, and different businesses have different risk levels and different tolerance for risk. The boilerplate statistics around failing to recover from a largescale data loss aren’t on your side. It’s said that 60% of companies who lose their data are no longer a company within six months.

When getting started with setting up a disaster recovery plan, your business must understand its RPO – Recovery Point Objective and RTO – Recovery Time Objective.

By setting these goals, businesses will fully understand their tolerance for risk and have a clear roadmap towards restoring operations to normal levels.

What is RTO?

Recovery time objective is simply the time your business needs to recover for a disaster. Ideally, your RTO is somewhere around a few minutes, but it could be thought of in hours, days or even weeks.

While time is money for any organization, larger companies – especially those in finance or retail strive for a much shorter RTO given the ROI associated with each hour of the day. Take Apple for instance. They make $869,000 in profit every second. For some small businesses, losing a few minutes here or there probably won’t dig significantly into profits – but a few days? Sure.

 What is RPO?

Recovery point objective is the process of determining how much data you can afford to lose and knowing how often your data should be backed up. During Prime Day, Amazon has come close to closing 500 sales per second. Losing minutes or even hours would not only result in lost profit, but a huge set of missing data. Because of this, companies like Amazon must backup more consistently than smaller companies who may only be inconvenienced by similar downtime.

Of course, a tighter window on RPO means a higher cost disaster recovery solution is necessary to meet the objective and ensure business is always running smoothly.

How Should These Objectives Be Built into a DRP?

RTO and RPO do not have to be universal to every aspect of your business. Email for example, can have a different RTO/RPO than a server that houses all your ecommerce transactions. A successful disaster recovery plan will outline specific RTO/RPO for all aspects of your operations.

To properly assess RTO/RPO, understand each business function and ask yourself, how much time or data can we afford to lose if these systems went down?

By taking this approach, your business will be prepared for single-system failures just as well as a largescale disaster.

Be Prepared with ThrottleNet

As St. Louis disaster recovery experts, ThrottleNet can help your company set the foundation for a quick recovery if downtime were to ever occur. By proactively monitoring your network, we aim to ensure you never have to use your plan.

Contact us today for a free, no-obligation network assessment.