RPOs & RTOs: Lowering the Cost of Recovery

Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) are the foundation of any disaster recovery plan. More so, they are the foundation of maintaining ‘always on’ critical business operations and customer experiences. These disaster recovery metrics help a business understand the very real costs of data disruption—and the consequential cost to recover from an outage. Becoming IT resilient means adapting your organization’s disaster recovery strategy to keep these objective times as low as possible. Luckily, lowering RPOs and RTOs to within a few seconds is not only possible, but simple, with Zerto. Yet, many backup and recovery solutions still leave gaps in time and data integrity.

Lost Data vs. Lost Time

While RPO and RTO are often used together, it’s important to remember what each represents as part of a disaster recovery plan.

• Recovery Point Objectives: An RPO represents a company’s goal for data loss in the event of an outage or disaster. RPOs answer the question: When a disruption occurs, how much time has passed since our last backup?
• Recovery Time Objectives:An RTO represents a company’s goal for time spent recovering after an outage or disaster. RTOs answer the question: When a disruption occurs, how long will it take to get back up and running?

Both play an important role in solidifying the IT resilience of an organization: one estimating how much might be lost, and the other gauging how long it will take to fix. Together, they are used to plan for the various kinds of losses associated with a data disruption; be it an unplanned outage, natural disaster, or ransomware attack.

We Can Go Lower

Every business knows the importance of maintaining low RPOs and RTOs. Regrettably, many organizations have settled for strategies that achieve only the bare-minimum—remaining operational long-term, but still losing hours, even entire days, of productivity and data. In the past, this was often the best that could be hoped for, but it’s not so any longer. Given the ever-increasing threat of ransomware attacks, coupled with business’ growing reliance on cloud-based storage, keeping objective times low is more important now than ever. Why settle for acceptable losses, when you can prevent those losses almost entirely? A bold claim, but one that Zerto makes a reality for thousands of customers every day.

How to Achieve the Lowest Recovery Times in the Industry

1. Lowering RPO

Increasing the rate at which your data is replicated is the key to decreasing your RPO. With traditional recovery options, snapshots are taken every few hours or days. Zerto keeps your data up to date within seconds, so you can rest easy knowing your replicated data is right behind production.

• Continuous Data Protection

With Zerto’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP), your data is constantly saved as changes are made, allowing for RPOs as fast as data is updated. And because CDP works in the background, replicating has no production impact—weekends and odd hours are free from time-consuming snapshots.

• Scalable Architecture

A flexible, scalable architecture underpins and enables recovery from a disaster of any size—from one application to an entire server. No matter the size, your disaster recovery solution must work at-scale in any environment, recovering all your operation-critical data—still without downtime or data loss.

• Journal-Based Recovery

Having continuous replication can only lower RPOs if your solution has the granularity to recover to the exact moment in time that you need. Journal-Based Recovery can recover to the precise moment immediately before a disruption, giving you the lowest RPOs possible.

2. Lowering RTO

To lower your RTO, on the other hand, you need a solution that is both fast and efficient when it comes time to recover. Getting back to business quickly requires an intuitive interface and lightning-fast speeds that guarantee you’ll be spending as little time as possible recovering.

• Orchestration and Automation

Recovery has never been easier with Zerto’s orchestration and automation tools. Recovery is as simple as a single click, and the replication process works without hassle or time-consuming maintenance.

• Direct to Production

With traditional recovery options, restored data requires a move back into a production-grade storage before it can be used—adding even more time, energy and risk to the process. Zerto’s instant recovery automatically recovers to production-grade storage, so business as usual can begin right away.

Interested in learning more? Watch our webinar— “Recovery Cost Limbo: How Low Can Your RPO/RTO Go?” and discover new ways to measure objective times, hear testimonials from customers who’ve done it, and learn from leading IT experts about how you to save your business both time and resources.