RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective. It’s a metric that helps to calculate how quickly you need to recover your IT infrastructure and services following a disaster in order to maintain business continuity.

RTO is measured in terms of how long your business can survive following a disaster before operations are restored to normal. If your RTO is twenty-four hours, it means you’ve determined that the business can maintain operations for that amount of time without having its normal data and infrastructure available. If data and infrastructure are not recovered within twenty-four hours, the business could suffer irreparable harm.

RPO, or Recovery Point Objective, is a measurement of the maximum tolerable amount of data to lose. It also helps to measure how much time can occur between your last data backup and a disaster without causing serious damage to your business. RPO is useful for determining how often to perform data backups.

RPO is significant because in most cases, you will likely lose some data when a disaster occurs. Even data that is backed up in real-time has a risk of some data loss. Most businesses back up data at fixed intervals of time — once every hour, once every day, or perhaps as infrequently as once every week. The RPO measures how much data you can afford to lose as the result of a disaster.