In our digital era, IT systems underpin nearly all key business functions. However, outages from cybercrime, natural disasters and infrastructure failures remain inevitable. A 2020 Statista survey found that 54% of businesses suffered an infrastructure disruption annually, losing an average of $250,000 from each incident. Without resilience against disruptions, companies across industries are realizing business continuity planning must now rank alongside customer acquisition and product development in strategic importance.
Constructing resilience starts with normalizing discussion of disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity. One enabler lies in establishing a common lexicon covering critical disaster recovery terminologies. Let‘s decode key DR language to pave building organizational resilience.
RTO and RPO – Recovery Time and Data Loss Limits
The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines your maximum tolerable restoration time after an outage. While hospitals may mandate RTOs under one hour for electronic medical records access, retailers might allow up to 24 hours before customer services are impacted. The table below provides sample RTOs by application type:
| Application | Sample RTOs |
| Core banking | 2 hours |
| E-commerce | 1 hour |
| Messaging | 4 hours |
| Billing | 8 hours |
More aggressive RTOs require infrastructure investments like redundant equipment and backup data centers. Striking cost/risk balances makes RTO planning complex but highly consequential.
Your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) dictates acceptable data loss if disaster strikes. Online transaction processing for banks may mandate RPOs under one hour, while social media sites might allow up to a day of content loss. Similar to RTOs, compression of the RPO window demands increased data protection spending.
Real-World RTO/RPO Failures
Colossal real-world disruptions underline the need to define and meet RTO/RPO targets:
- A 2021 AWS outage downed websites like Venmo and Instacart for 8-12 hours, exceeding typical e-commerce RTO limits
- Ransomware shutdown the Colonial Pipeline in 2021 for nearly a week, outpacing reasonable energy delivery firm RTO durations
- During the 2022 Southwest Airlines meltdown, internal logistics systems failed with no contingency, vastly surpassing airline RTO needs to reroute aircraft and passengers
Proactively limiting disaster impact via RTO and RPO remains paramount. Now let‘s explore solutions for maintaining operations if outages strike.
Failover and Failback – Keeping Operations Humming
Failover refers automatically…
