What is recovery time objective?

Recovery Time Objective explained

Recovery time objectives represent the amount of time an application can be down and not result in significant damage to a business and the time that it takes for the system to go from loss to recovery. This recovery process includes the steps that IT must take to return the application and its data to its pre-disaster state. For high-priority applications, a recovery time objective can be safely expressed in seconds, as long as the IT department has invested in failover services.  Recovery time objectives require your IT department to first sort applications based on their priority and risk of business loss. IT then allots these applications the appropriate amount of your enterprise’s resources, namely time, money and IT infrastructure.

How do you determine a recovery time objective?

Recovery time objectives are used to measure how much time it takes after the disaster for the IT department to recover the data. For their assessment basis, recovery time objectives represent the overall needs of your business and determine how long your business can survive withoutIT infrastructure and services. Recovery time objectives first need to be aligned with what’s possible by your IT department. IT administrators need a strong comprehension of the different type of restore speeds to calculate a recovery time objective that meets the needs of the business. For example, a recovery time objective of one hour can’t be met if the minimum possible restore time is two hours.   

Because the process involves restoring all IT operations, recovery time objectives are often complicated. Your IT department can streamline some of the recovery process by automating as much as possible. The recovery time objective may have greater costs than that of a granular recovery point objective, and a demanding recovery time objective involves your entire business infrastructure, not just your data. The cost of attaining a recovery time objective or recovery point objective is matched with your IT department’s prioritization of applications and data. IT prioritizes applications and data based on their revenue and risk.  If an application’s data is regulated, then data loss from that app could result in large fines regardless of how often that app is used.

What is a recovery point objective and how are recovery time objectives different?

Recovery time objectives coincide with recovery point objectives, a measurement of time from the failure, disaster or similar loss-causing event. Recovery point objectives calculate back in time to when your data was last usable, probably the most recent backup. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives are crucial concepts for business continuity and are necessary business metrics for determining how often your enterprise should schedule its data backups.

Example of a recovery time objective

Granular item recovery is one example of a recovery time objective. For this example, a user at a busy company deletes an important email and empties the trash folder. This company uses Microsoft Exchange as a business-critical application and it’s IT department perpetually backs up delta-level changes in Exchange along with a backup app that features granular backup and recovery. This feature allows the IT department to quickly retrieve the important email in about five minutes instead of restoring a full virtual machine for only one email. 

Attaining a near-zero recovery time objective or recovery point objective

While recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives vary regarding the application and data priority, it’s incredibly costly for any enterprise to deliver a near-zero recovery time objective or recovery point objective for all their applications. A 100 percent uptime for recovery time objective and zero lost data for recovery point objective can only be attained by investing in continuous data replication and virtual environments.