What is RTO for Business Continuity

Posted by alvina on January 28th, 2018

Time is money and no business can afford to have downtime- business disruption translates into a loss of revenue and consequently reduced profits. More importantly, it loses customers to its competitors and if a business is disrupted for even a couple of days, the business may never recover. The importance of ensuring business continuity cannot be emphasized enough.

However, in order to ensure that businesses remain in operation in spite of downtime disasters, the recovery time for mission-critical applications should be very small. Thus, businesses have to prepare for disruptions by having an effective business continuity plan. In today’s business environment where cyber-attacks and natural disasters take the toll of businesses, key metrics like RTO and RPO play an important role.

Put simply, RTO (recovery time objective) refers to that amount of real time that you set for your business to recover after a business disruption, whileRPO (recovery point objective) is associated with the ‘variable amount of lost data’ that needs re-working on. Once you calculate your RTO, you know how much of time you have to prepare and how much of your budget you have to allocate to ensure business continuity. An RTO process basically lets you know how much of time your business can survive when there’s an outage or a system malfunction.

Many small and medium businesses are exploited viciously by outsiders and suffer in the process, just because they don’t have an adequate business continuity plan in place. Together, RTO and RPO help enterprises to identify strategies that need to be incorporated into any business continuity plan. Any such plan should be able to

• identify risks and assess the impact it has on business,
• a strategy in place that responds, manages and helps business to recover from a disaster as quickly as possible

Systems are broadly classified into different categories- critical, important or less critical based on RTO and how important they are to your business. While RTO process focuses on the business and systems as a whole, RPO concentrates on data and how resilient the company is to its loss.

As businesses are different, any business plan that’s implemented should obviously address the specific needs of that particular business. It should be able to provide practical plans of action that need to be implemented in case of disasters or any crisis. If this plan is executed well, then it gives a clear picture of the risks the business face, how any crisis has to be handled and what needs to be done if the business is to recover quickly from any incident. Calculating the RTO and RPO will help companies achieve this. To have an RTO and RPO of milliseconds would be the ideal scenario, but attaining that is next to impossible.

In today’s computer networked age, enterprises need to have a foolproof disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Furthermore, it’s vital that they realize the importance of RTO and RPO, two important parameters that dictate disaster recovery, data backup, ensuring business continuity planning.

After all, the business of all businesses is to stay in business!