RTOs and RPOs will vary depending on the business you’re in and the individual applications and data in question. Recovery point objective, or RPO, refers to the amount of data you can afford to lose and effectively dictates how frequently you need to back up your data to avoid losing more.Recovery time objective, or RTO, refers to maximum amount of time the business can afford to be without access to the data or application-or, how quickly you need to recover the data and application.Typically, the first step in creating a backup strategy-especially an enterprise backup strategy-is to determine recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives for each data source and application. How you back up your data and applications (i.e., how frequently you back them up and to what device or location) depends on the cost of losing access to the data and applications for any period of time and the cost of replacing or recreating the data if it’s lost for good.
