They are both crucial elements of business continuity, and they sound quite similar and confusing.
What is RTO ?
As per BS 25999-2, a leading business continuity standard, defines RTO as “…target time set for resumption of product, service or activity delivery after an incident”.
RTO, or Recovery Time Objective, is the target time you set for the recovery of your IT and business activities after a disaster has struck. The goal here is to calculate how quickly you need to recover,. For example, if RTO is 3 hours, then you need to invest quite a lot of money in a disaster recovery – because you want to be able to achieve full recovery in only 3 hours. However, if your RTO is 1 week, then the required investment will be much lower because you will have enough time to acquire resources after an incident has occurred. And incase you need RTO =0, means dude, you need redundant infrastructure, lot of investment is required. So RTO is not talking about data loss.
What is RPO?
RPO, or Recovery Point Objective, is focused on data and your company’s loss tolerance in relation to your data. RPO is determined by looking at the time between data backups and the amount of data that could be lost in between backups. For example, If your RPO is 3 hours, then you need to perform backup at least every 3 hours.
Dude, What’s the difference?
The difference is in the purpose – RTO has a broader purpose because it sets the boundaries for your whole business continuity management, while RPO is focused solely on the issue of backup frequency. They are not directly related – you could have RTO of 24 hours and RPO of 1 hour, or RTO of 2 hours and RPO of 12 hours.
What is common between RTO and RPO ?
They are both vital for business impact analysis (BIA) and for business continuity management (BCM).
What is RTO ?
As per BS 25999-2, a leading business continuity standard, defines RTO as “…target time set for resumption of product, service or activity delivery after an incident”.
RTO, or Recovery Time Objective, is the target time you set for the recovery of your IT and business activities after a disaster has struck. The goal here is to calculate how quickly you need to recover,. For example, if RTO is 3 hours, then you need to invest quite a lot of money in a disaster recovery – because you want to be able to achieve full recovery in only 3 hours. However, if your RTO is 1 week, then the required investment will be much lower because you will have enough time to acquire resources after an incident has occurred. And incase you need RTO =0, means dude, you need redundant infrastructure, lot of investment is required. So RTO is not talking about data loss.
What is RPO?
RPO, or Recovery Point Objective, is focused on data and your company’s loss tolerance in relation to your data. RPO is determined by looking at the time between data backups and the amount of data that could be lost in between backups. For example, If your RPO is 3 hours, then you need to perform backup at least every 3 hours.
Dude, What’s the difference?
The difference is in the purpose – RTO has a broader purpose because it sets the boundaries for your whole business continuity management, while RPO is focused solely on the issue of backup frequency. They are not directly related – you could have RTO of 24 hours and RPO of 1 hour, or RTO of 2 hours and RPO of 12 hours.
What is common between RTO and RPO ?
They are both vital for business impact analysis (BIA) and for business continuity management (BCM).
