Recovery Point Objective: A Critical Element of Data Recovery

A data disaster can happen at any time. Do you think your business can survive losing a day, a week, or even a month's worth of data?

When it comes to data backup and disaster recovery, determining your recovery point objective (RPO) is critical. RPO is the metric you set for the amount of data your business can afford to lose in a data disaster. 

Your RPO helps decide how often you need to back up your data systems and the necessary infrastructure to sustain your backup plan. In most cases, a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution from a managed service provider can help you meet your recovery point objective goals.

RPO is a crucial business metric that every organization should track. When combined with a recovery time objective (RTO), RPO provides a prioritized list of all systems, applications, and data to protect.

A business’ loss tolerance, or how much data it can lose without suffering severe damage, is connected to RPO and outlined in its business continuity strategy. As RPO refers to the last period when the company's data was preserved in a viable state, it also specifies processes for disaster recovery planning, including the appropriate backup interval. For instance, RPOs with a duration of 60 minutes need a continuous backup every 60 minutes.

RPO is typically combined with recovery time objective (RTO), or the estimated time it takes for a company's activities to resume regular operations following a data disaster. These measurements support company’s plan for disaster recovery, mainly to stay operational during and after a crisis. Disaster recovery solutions that use RTO and RPO often guarantee that vital information is properly copied, preserved, and quickly accessible when needed.

You can define different RPO for different parts of your business. For example, platforms such as email servers, ERP systems, CRM tools, and HRMS can have various RPO and RTO values.

Importance of RPO

A single unplanned outage can be catastrophic for your business. The risk of data loss has significant repercussions for businesses. As business operations are crucial to any organization's existence, many have strict standards to maintain optimal security for valuable data assets.

A recovery point objective is crucial because it can massively impact how an organization operates and costs money. For example, if you set an RPO of 6 hours across your systems and encounter a crippling digital event, you will most likely lose 6 hours of data since the last, most recent point from which you can recover stored data is 6 hours ago.

RPO establishes:

• The minimal backup schedule frequency
• How much data can be lost after a disaster that causes substantial harm to the company
• How far back the IT team should deploy recovery strategies without delaying data loss against expected RTO

Benefits of RPO

Electronic information and software propel business development. Adopting a disaster recovery strategy protects companies from data loss and its damaging effects. RPOs and RTOs are critical components of a superior data protection and disaster recovery plan.

Adopting and executing appropriate RPOs benefit data protection and disaster recovery strategies and other business processes in a variety of ways:

• Granular restoration: An efficient RPO provides granular data recovery. Restoring a specific piece of data from a backup saves businesses money and effort without adding complexity. Granular restoration allows users to quickly locate and retrieve a particular file or document. This recovery method reduces the need to restore an entire system or storage device merely to recover a single file.
• Data security and compliance: Businesses need to maintain compliance at all levels, and reliable data is a critical component. A disaster recovery strategy with appropriate recovery point objectives ensures adequate backups with no risk of losing important data. Businesses can use data encryption and access management security with cloud-based solutions. Only by protecting current data can one ensure regulatory compliance.
  
  Cloud-based solutions give companies access to a wide range of capabilities to comply with key data privacy regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Service Organization Control 2 (SOC2), and ISO 27001.
• Cost-effective operations: Businesses can protect existing IT investments with an effective backup policy that incorporates appropriate RPOs for secure and regular backups. Expanding data security to the cloud offers further benefits since it frees up investments in on-premises technology and converts upfront capital costs to budget-friendly operational expenditures.

How does recovery point objective work?

RPOs specify the amount of time that can elapse before data loss’ magnitude exceeds the permissible limit under a business continuity plan (BCP). Loss tolerance varies by business process and workload, influencing the associated RPO for that workload.

High-priority applications often have stricter RPOs that require more frequent backups. In such cases, the IT team needs to prepare backup solutions to meet certain RPOs, such as a mix of snapshots and replication (also known as near-continuous data protection (CDP)).

When RPO is near zero, IT merges failover services with continuous replication or a continuous data protection system to achieve almost 100% application and data availability.

Setting an appropriate data backup frequency ensures continuous backup within the loss tolerance limit. System administrators can automatically define an RPO as a policy option within backup or storage software and cloud services.

How to define RPOs

RPOs are often chosen depending on data update frequency. This guarantees that, in the event of a service disruption, all resumed operations have the most recent version of the data. For example, regularly changing files requires a short (no more than a few minutes) RPO. This implies that companies can resume operations with minimal data loss after a disruption.

Once established, RPOs should become the pillars of your business continuity strategy, acting as targets for the operations they define. Your program should outline different RPOsfor different business units. A mission-critical data activity, such as financial transactions, requires a shorter RPO than less regularly updated files, such as employee information.

The following are some sample tiers you should consider when determining the appropriate RPOs for your organizational units:

• 0 - 1 hour: These are mission-critical services that cannot lose more than an hour of data. Business and data transactions are typically bigger in volume and more variable, making reconstruction challenging due to the number of variables involved. This category includes financial transactions, CRM systems, and patient records.
• 1 - 4 hours: This category includes semi-critical business units that can tolerate up to four hours of data loss. Examples are customer chat logs and file servers.
• 4 - 12 hours: This group of business units cannot tolerate sacrificing more than 12 hours' worth of data. Examples are marketing and sales data.
• 13 -24 hours: The business units in this group manage semi-important data and need an RPO of no more than 24 hours. This can include staffing and purchasing divisions that update data less frequently than other business areas.

Recovery point objective example

While RTO and RPO are linked in many ways, RPOs relate specifically to the retained data. There’s an RPO for everything, whether it's a client database, financial transactions, or a list of staff birthdays. Businesses with effective disaster recovery (DR) plans incorporate RPOs in their approach and planning.

Here’s an example of recovery point objectives in action.

A big global e-commerce website with several servers for various tasks develops recovery point targets depending on a server’s unique usage and the data it maintains. As it operates globally and sells 24 hours a day, key parts of its data management system require continuous replication rather than daily or weekly backups. Executives can highlight the following recovery point objectives:

• One-minute RPOs: Systems and processes such as payment gateways, inventory stock levels, email servers, confirmation logs, and shipping databases have one-minute rolling RPOs.
• One-hour RPOs: Components such as website interface, customer information, product dashboards, and user password authentication may require one-hour RPOs.
• 24-hour RPOs: Content creation databases, customer conversation logs, and customer reviews can have more extended 24-hour RPOs.

If a massive data incident happens, the e-commerce company's critical information, such as evidence of things sold, reverts to the most up-to-date information since it’s recorded every 60 seconds.

Slightly less critical information, such as a customer product review published shortly before the data loss, wouldn't be on the site after the restoration. Still, those from the previous day will remain because IT set the RPO to 24 hours.

Recovery time objective vs. recovery point objective

The recovery point objective is closely linked to the recovery time objective. It’s the maximum amount of time that business computing resources and applications can remain inoperative following a malfunction or disaster. These metrics can help guide selecting suitable data backup strategies. They also provide a base for discovering and evaluating viable solutions that will allow a company to resume business operations within a timeframe close to RPO and RTO.

The two techniques enable business continuity planning (BCP) and a DR plan. Although interrelated, understanding the difference between RTO and RPO helps a company’s bottom line.

Recovery point objective

RPO governs loss tolerance and the amount of data a business can afford to lose. It's a planning goal that specifies how frequently IT teams should back up data to enable recovery.

A company supports RPOs by implementing a DR strategy that backs up data at appropriate intervals, ensuring that data loss never exceeds the business's predefined loss tolerance.

Recovery time objective

RTO comes into the equation following a “loss event”. It assists a company in assessing how soon it can recover from a data loss due to a malfunction, natural disaster, or misconduct. RTO further explains, "How long should it take to restore normal operations after a business process disruption?". RPO and RTO work together, with RPO ensuring a company has the proper data backup procedures and RTO guaranteeing that backups recover quickly.

RPOs and RTOs vary by application and data importance. Near-zero RPO and RTO are incredibly expensive since the only way to avoid zero data loss and 100% uptime is continuous data replication in virtual failover environments. 

Due to the cost of attaining a near-zero RPO and selecting the right data and systems, the cost of achieving adequate RPO and RTO depends on the purpose, risk, and expenses. RTO focuses on systems and applications, meaning it mainly computes time constraints on service downtime rather than data recovery.

This is another way of understanding the RTO vs. RPO debate: RPO concerns how much data a business loses following a failure. RTO addresses poor user experience and unhappy consumers, whereas RPO addresses catastrophic situations like losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in client transactions.

Factors influencing RPO

There are several factors to consider when developing an RPO strategy, including:

• Industry: Companies that deal with rapidly evolving or sensitive data (for example, health data or banking transactions) update their databases more regularly than businesses that work with static files.
• Data storage: Where your data resides (for example, in physical devices, the cloud, and so on) influences how quickly you can restore it during a service failure.
• Compliance challenges: Many compliance systems include sections related to disaster recovery and data availability. For example, SOC 2 accreditation demands a particular degree of data accessibility and processing integrity, affecting the allowable amount of data lost during a service failure.

How to calculate RPO

How you want recovery to function dictates the frequency with which you back up key data, apps, and systems. There are two key disaster recovery objectives when planning a DR strategy: RTO and RPO. Consider the following five steps when calculating recovery point objectives for your company or industry.

1. Review how frequently files update

You can control the periodicity of updating files by setting an RPO goal. This makes your most recent data accessible. For example, you have digital copies and operations that update every 30 minutes. Establishing an RPO for every 30-40 minutes ensures you consistently access the most up-to-date data with little information loss.

In contrast, if your business defined an RPO for a weekly backup save every Saturday night, a technical failure that occurs on Saturday afternoon would result in the loss of a whole week's worth of data since the system backup had not yet taken place that day. You can modify your RPO, so try regularly assessing your file update periods to see whether the RPO needs changing.

2. Examine your BCP goals

Recovery point objectives complement your business continuity plan goals. So carefully evaluate each aspect to define RPOs with different time allotments for every business segment, depending on the data they contain and how crucial they are if data loss occurs.

For example, a national bank's financial transactions and necessary data operations are critical and need significantly shorter RPO times than human resource documents with personnel records that are updated less regularly and can withstand a longer RPO time.

3. Consider industry norms

While each company's RPO requirements could be unique, you can use industry standards to guide you when establishing RPOs for organizational units at your business. Most business transactions fit within general industry RPO time parameters. However, depending on your company’s size or its objective, you can employ weekly data settings.

For example, a global air carrier with employees spread across hundreds of locations will most likely update its HR records frequently. In contrast, a single office insurance provider with 30 employees can choose to update personnel files once a week because they’re less prone to change than the airline's HR records.

4. Develop and authorize each RPO

Develop RPOs after examining all risks for each aspect of your data management and having them accepted by executives for IT or partner deployment. Document the process thoroughly and keep records to refer to and use as a benchmark for reviewing or adjusting an RPO.

5. Regularly evaluate your RPO parameters

Your recovery point objectives can evolve as your company develops or your business continuity strategies change. Consider introducing a systematic and frequent analysis and assessing how well your current RPO settings perform and whether they need to be adjusted.

Even though it comes last, this is a vital step. If you have a data loss event or system failure, an ad hoc evaluation and in-depth examination of how your RPO and RTO performed can provide valuable insights into your entire data management system.

Failover and RPO

Failover is switching between your primary and backup systems during an outage or scheduled system downtime. It’s essential to consider your company's RPOs when selecting a failover solution to avoid losing excessive data while moving to a backup server. For instance, a 10-minute RPO indicates that your failover solution must respond within that timeframe to ensure that you don't lose more than 10 minutes of data.

Failover methods can include:

• A domain name system (DNS) directs traffic from a hardware solution to an off-site data center. DNS servers are essential for cross-data center recovery from data center crashes. However, this approach has several possible drawbacks, including Time-to-live (TTL) related delays and service loss, which can increase data recovery time. Furthermore, the routing method can cause uneven failover since internet service providers (ISPs) can continue forwarding traffic to the wrong server until their DNS cache restores.
• Physical devices that are retained on-site as hardware solutions. If one device fails, traffic diverts to a backup server. This approach eliminates the latency concerns linked with DNS failover. It does, however, need hosting your backup site at the exact physical location as your primary server. This is often a poor technique since it exposes the backup location to many risks that will affect your primary server cluster (for example, local power grid failure or natural disasters).
• On-edge services that combine the advantages of both DNS and hardware-based solutions. Physical device maintenance involves no TTL delays or additional expenses. This ensures little data loss, enabling businesses to meet their RPO targets.

How much data can you afford to lose?

Planning for disaster recovery can be difficult and time-consuming. If you don't have the right tools or experience, it's easy to miss things. But with a good IT team and regular training in place, you can avoid some of the mistakes that could cost your company dearly in lost revenue.

Take your disaster recovery to the next level with DRaaS.