IT & Cloud

RTO / RPO

Also called: Recovery Time Objective, Recovery Point Objective

Two recovery targets: RTO is how long a system may be down, RPO is how much recent data may be lost. Together they dictate what backup and failover design is required.

These two numbers convert business tolerance into engineering. An RPO of 15 minutes means continuous or near-continuous replication, not nightly backup; an RTO of one hour rules out restoring from a slow offsite archive. Every backup design decision traces back to them.

Set them per system, not per company. A point-of-sale platform and an archive of old drawings warrant very different targets, and paying for aggressive recovery on everything is how disaster recovery budgets get rejected wholesale.

Related terms

3-2-1 Backup Rule: A backup baseline: three copies of data, on two different media types, with one copy offsite — extended today to include one immutable or offline copy.
SLA: The contractual commitment defining response and resolution targets by severity, coverage hours, and the remedy when targets are missed.
Cloud Migration: Moving applications, data, and infrastructure from on-premises servers to cloud platforms — by lift-and-shift, re-platforming, or replacement with SaaS.
SD-WAN: A WAN architecture that pools multiple circuits — fibre, cable, LTE — under software control, steering each application over the best available path and failing over automatically.

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