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Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data your business can afford to lose due to an unexpected event like a system failure or disaster. It is measured in time — specifically, the interval between your last successful data backup and the disruptive event.
In simpler terms, RPO defines:
It is crucial to have a comprehensive business continuity plan (BCP) in place to ensure your recovery strategies and technology are effective if a catastrophe occurs. A well-developed BCP will establish clear guidelines for the maximum allowable Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and help minimize data loss during disruptions.
Let’s say your business experiences a disaster, and the last backup was 8 hours ago. If your RPO is 10 hours, your backup falls within the acceptable limit. However, if your previous backup was 12 hours ago, this would exceed your data resilience threshold and impact operations.
RPO focuses on how much data a business can afford to lose. RTO determines how quickly systems operation systems need to be restored after a disruption and establishes the maximum acceptable downtime before your business becomes less efficient and starts to lose revenue.
A sound RPO helps maintain maintain the integrity of your disaster recovery plan in the following ways:
Follow these steps to calculate your business’s optimal RPO.
Decide how much data your business can afford to lose without severe disruptions to daily operations. For example, can you tolerate losing an hour’s worth of transactions, or is every second critical?
Calculate how an unplanned system downtime would affect your business’s operations and finances. Consider factors like how much income you lose per hour of downtime, effects on productivity, and potential loss of trust from your clients.
Create a comprehensive list of all systems and applications critical to your business and organize them into tiers based on their importance and acceptable data loss thresholds. For instance:
In disaster recovery, the most critical variables are your RPO and RTO. Your business must establish both to minimize disruptions and keep recovery time low. Zmanda’s disaster recovery solution supports these goals by securing data with seamless hybrid cloud setups and scalable backup options.
You can accelerate your recovery project using an advanced backup engine that eliminates outage notification delays and system restoration times to stay within your RPO limits — this means faster access to your data when needed.
Start a free trial to strategize your data backup, or book a free 30-minute consultation to see Zmanda in action. You can also contact our industry experts if you have questions.