Skip to content
Contact us

Determining RTO and RPO is Crucial to Business Continuity

Picture of Gennifer Biggs

While a comprehensive business continuity plan is non-negotiable in today's world of cyber attacks, complex and crucial IT environments, and natural disasters that only seem to get worse each year, one of the more critical points of an IT continuity plan can be taken for granted. Backups and protection for data are key, but when the time comes—can you confidently restore your data and systems?

No business continuity strategy is complete without a clear set of protocols guiding the recovery and restoration of vital operations—from data to apps to networks.

Key Takeaways

  • Define RTO and RPO early to clarify "how soon" you need systems back (RTO) and "how much data loss" you can tolerate (RPO)—forming the backbone of any restore plan.
  • Assign mission-critical systems short RTOs and minimal RPOs, while less critical apps can tolerate longer restore timeframes—a framework that optimizes cost and resilience.
  • Regular recovery drills, backup verification, and alignment with evolving threats (e.g., ransomware) are essential to ensure your RTO and RPO remain realistic, effective, and regulatory-compliant.

Key Elements of Comprehensive Business Continuity Planning

Let's start with a basic review of the elements of a responsible business continuity plan. A comprehensive business continuity plan (BCP) should go beyond a simple "backup" strategy. It needs to provide structure, accountability, and clarity so your business can withstand disruptions and recover quickly. The must-haves are listed below, but download our guide to business continuity planning for detailed guidance.

  • Risk Assessment & Business Impact Analysis (BIA): Identify potential threats of all types (cyberattacks, power outages, natural disasters, supply chain disruptions), then evaluate how each disruption would affect operations, revenue, compliance, and reputation. Craft a clear set of priorities for each scenario.
  • Clarify Roles & Responsibilities: Define leadership and chain of command, as well as documenting responsibilities for IT, operations, communications, HR, and vendors.
  • Detailed Incident Response & Communication Plans: Step-by-step playbooks for cyber incidents, data breaches, or facility outages. Don't overlook Internal and external communication guidelines.
  • IT Disaster Recovery & Data Protection: This critical section outlines SOP for a full backup and data restore strategy, including backups, recovery, and testing.
  • Continuity Strategies for Critical Business Functions: While the above section focuses on technology, this part of the plan addresses people, places, and things, such as alternate work sites, remote work readiness, supply chain contingency planning, and maintaining service levels throughout a disruption.
  • Emergency Procedures: Detailed guidance for evacuation, shelter-in-place, and health/safety protocols, as well as needed info to coordinate with local emergency services when the situation calls for it.
  • Plan Testing & Continuous Improvement: Schedule tabletop reviews supported by various testing scenarios and have a clear policy for regular updates to the plan.
  • Documentation & Accessibility: Your plan isn't worth anything if no one on your team knows about it. Communication and ongoing review, plus company-wide training, are key to success.

Learn more details in our ebook "Building Business Resilience"

Why RTO and RPO are Crucial to Business Continuity Planning

All the strategy and technology in the world won't matter if your organization cannot restore your data, applications, and systems to a functioning level after disruption, and within an acceptable time frame. That is why Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are such important components of a restore strategy within your BCP. These two concepts guide many aspects of business continuity because they help organizations define what matters most when it comes to business-critical vs. convenience data and what information and applications are most critical to business operations.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum amount of time your business can afford to be down after a disruption before it significantly impacts operations, customers, or revenue.

  • Think of it as: "How quickly do we need to be back up and running?"
  • Example: If your RTO for email is 4 hours, your continuity solution must restore access to email within 4 hours of an outage.
  • Influences: Technology solutions (like high-availability systems), staffing, and the complexity of your IT environment.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum amount of data your business can afford to lose, measured in time.

  • Think of it as: "How much data can we afford to lose if systems go down?"
  • Example: If your RPO is 15 minutes, your backup system must capture data at least every 15 minutes.
  • Influences: Backup frequency, replication technologies, and storage infrastructure.

How RTO and RPO Work Together

These two concepts define your organization's tolerance for downtime and data loss and guide your incident response and business continuity planning. Keep in mind that data recovery priorities can be significantly different depending on the type and impact of a disruption. For example, recovery from a massive natural disaster, which often relies on outside support, could differ greatly from the recovery time for an internal hardware failure. Response times also vary according to the type of business you operate. For example, the tolerance for a healthcare provider may be considerably different from those of a retail shop. See our example below.

RTO = Time tolerance (speed of recovery) plus RPO = Data tolerance (amount of acceptable loss) form the foundation for selecting the right backup, replication, and recovery solutions. Examples of wide-ranging data recovery priorities include:

  • Healthcare practice: RTO of 1 hour, RPO of near-zero—because patient safety and compliance demand it.
  • Professional services firm: RTO of 8 hours, RPO of 1 hour—acceptable since work can pause for part of a day without catastrophic impact.

Setting realistic RTOs and RPOs ensures you invest wisely in continuity solutions by balancing cost with risk. These standards also provide a benchmark for testing recovery strategies. They also drive partner selection, since not all managed services providers (MSPs) can meet aggressive recovery objectives.

Determining Your RTO and RPO Limits

Now that we've explained these critical elements of backup and disaster recovery, how do you know what is right for your organization?

Typically, RTO/RPO are evaluated according to three tiers:

  • Tier 1 (Mission-Critical): For critical applications with high business impact, an RTO of 15 minutes and a near-zero RPO is a common target.
  • Tier 2 (Important, but not mission-critical): These applications might have an RTO of approximately four hours and an RPO of about two hours.
  • Tier 3 (Non-critical): Less critical applications can typically tolerate longer recovery times, such as an RTO of 8 to 24 hours and an RPO of four hours.

Determining where elements of your business fall can be guided by your original Business Impact Analysis. As part of any successful business continuity plan, you must invest the time to thoroughly analyze potential business impacts of multiple types of disruptions. Use that analysis as the basis for setting realistic RTO and RPO values. Examples of influences that impact restore priorities in disaster recovery include service commitments, compliance, and risk and cost tolerance.

  • If you have service commitments to your customers, such as we do as an MSP, you will want to factor in those agreements and determine what systems and data are needed to get your customer service back online fast.
  • Don't overlook the requirements of regulatory compliance. Industries such as healthcare and finance have strict regulations, such as GDPR, that mandate specific RTO and RPO standards to protect sensitive data. 
  • Lastly, remember that you will likely never restore every system and all your data as quickly as you would like, unless you have an unlimited budget and access to extensive support from outside your business. There is a cost associated with low RTO and RPO values (close to zero), so organizations must balance recovery goals with budget constraints. 

As you work through this process, lean on your MSP. Exigent has been working with many of its clients for two or more decades, and we've weathered our share of disruptions, big and small. We can leverage our frontline experience to help guide your planning, as any reputable MSP should. Additionally, we'll work with you to craft a detailed blueprint for the infrastructure needed to support realistic recovery objectives, helping fit your needs to your budget.

Let's talk about how we can help.

Want to learn more about business continuity? People also read: