The two numbers every recovery plan needs
RTO and RPO sound like jargon. They are really two questions about your business that you want answered on a calm day, not during an outage.
Most organizations discover their recovery capability at the worst possible time — mid-incident, with everyone watching. It does not have to be that way. Behind the acronyms, disaster-recovery planning comes down to two numbers, and both are business decisions before they are technical ones.
RPO — how much data can you afford to lose
Recovery Point Objective is the age of the data you would be restoring from. If your backups run once a night and something fails at 4 p.m., you have lost a day's work. Is that survivable? For some systems it is an annoyance; for an order database or a case-management system it may be unacceptable. RPO is you deciding, in advance, how much lost work and re-keying the business can absorb — and that decision drives how often things must be backed up.
RTO — how long can you be down
Recovery Time Objective is how long it takes to get back to working. Restoring several terabytes over a modest internet link takes hours whether you like it or not. Standing up a replacement server, reconfiguring it and testing it takes longer than people expect. RTO is you deciding how long the business can operate degraded or stopped, which in turn decides what you must pay for in standby capacity.
Why writing them down changes things
Once those two numbers exist, everything else becomes a design problem with a right answer. A four-hour RTO and a one-hour RPO buy a very different architecture than "by the end of the week is fine." Without the numbers, teams either over-spend on resilience nobody needed or, far more commonly, quietly under-provision and find out during the outage.
The step everyone skips
A plan you have never rehearsed is a hypothesis. The single most valuable disaster-recovery exercise is to actually restore something, time it, and write down what broke. Backups that report success every night routinely fail their first real restore — a missing encryption key, an incompatibility, a dependency nobody documented. Better to meet those on a Tuesday afternoon than during the real thing.
Pick your two numbers first. The technology conversation gets much simpler once the business has answered the only two questions that matter.
More from ALCO
What good IT reporting should tell you
If you fund IT but can't see what it's doing, you're paying on faith. Here's what a clear report should show — and why i
Read moreReuse is the real password problem
The weak password is rarely the one that gets you breached. The reused one is.
Read moreWhat break-fix really costs
Paying only when something breaks looks like the frugal choice. The math usually says otherwise.
Read moreIs this the right fit?
We qualify every engagement before we quote one. That means a technical conversation about your estate, not a sales call — and a straight answer if we are not the right firm.