Disaster recovery consists of a set of policies, tools and procedures in order to enable recovery and continuation of Vital Technology Infrastructure and systems, post a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster Recovery mainly focuses on the IT or technology systems which support a critical business function. While in business continuity, it includes keeping all the important aspects of a business functioning regardless of the significant disruptive events. Therefore, Disaster Recovery can be considered as a subset of Business Continuity.

The two most important parameters when it comes to Disaster Recovery or Data Protection Plan are Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). These objectives have the ability to guide the enterprises to choose an optimal data backup plan. The RPO/RTO, in addition to a business impact analysis, provides the basis for identifying and analysing viable strategies for including in the Business Continuity Plan. Feasible strategy options include options which enable the resumption of a particular business process within a time frame at/near the RTO/RPO.

For a better understanding, let’s look more into RTO and RPO in detail.

RPO: Recovery Point Objective

Recovery Point Object (RPO) means the amount of time that might pass during a disruption before the amount of data lost during that specific period crosses the Business Continuity Plan’s maximum allowable threshold or “tolerance”.

Just to give you an example, if the last available good data copy upon an outage is of 18 hours ago and this business has the RPO of 20 hours, we still remain inside the parameters of the Business Continuity Plan’s RPO.

RTO: Recovery Time Objective

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the amount of time and service level within which a business process should be restored back to normalcy after a disaster so as to avoid unacceptable consequences which are associated with a break in the continuity. RPO designates the variable amount of data that the company will lose or will have to re-enter during the network downtime. RTO designates the amount of “real time”, which can actually pass before the disruption starts to seriously and unacceptably obstruct the flow of normal business operations.

There has to be a gap between the actual RTA/RPA and the objectives which have been introduced by various steps – both automated and manual to bring the business application upwards. This actual data can only be exposed with the help of rehearsals of disasters or business disruption.

Improved products and technology bring additional costs along with it. The organisation has to determine, by calculating the RPO & RTO as well as its overall continuity and recovery planning, which investment is worth the big money