While the idea of constantly backing up your data to multiple locations may sound like a perfect solution, in reality it would put unnecessary strain on your hardware, and cost the earth! When it comes down to it, most companies opt to perform backups on a weekly or monthly basis, and this is where Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) come in. The RPO is the time gap between a data disaster and the last usable data backup that is stored. RPO is also referred to as a company’s ‘data loss tolerance’, meaning the amount of data that you can afford to lose before the damage is considered ‘significant’. While the data recovery process generally preserves data changes made right before the data failure, RPO is used to determine the frequency of data backup, and the tolerance of data loss that your business might need.

While some data losses wouldn’t affect the day-to-day operations of your business, others could take a heavy toll if they take too long to recover. This is what makes Recovery Time Objects (RTOs) important. An RTO is the amount of time that a business can function without a particular application before it incurs a significant loss, and is used as the basis for determining which applications to restore as a matter of priority, and how long a full restore should take. RTO can be measured in seconds or may take a longer duration depending on the size of a backup and the priority of the applications affected by the data failure.

Business Critical Applications are those which, if compromised, could result in serious damage in terms of productivity, finances, legal terms, customer dissatisfaction, reliability, and other such critical areas. These applications need to keep running to ensure optimum productivity and, should a data disaster occur, they are the first that need to be restored to avoid a serious loss.