Picture Monday, 8:02 a.m. Your server, your cloud account or your whole office network is down. Two questions decide how bad the day is.
- RTO Recovery Time Objective
- How long can you be down? It is the target for getting back to work. An RTO of 4 hours means the plan is built so you are running again within 4 hours of the failure.
- RPO Recovery Point Objective
- How much recent work can you afford to lose? An RPO of 1 hour means copies are made at least hourly, so the worst case is redoing about an hour of work.
Example numbers (illustrative only)
| Kind of business | Example RTO | Example RPO | Why that number |
| Retail shop with a card terminal and online orders | 1 hour | 15 minutes | Every hour offline is sales walking out the door. |
| Clinic or office with a scheduling system | 4 hours | 1 hour | The front desk cannot check people in, and today’s changes matter. |
| Accounting or law office | 4 hours (less in deadline weeks) | 4 hours | The right answer changes with the calendar. |
| Multi-crew contractor with estimates and job schedules | Next business day | 24 hours | Crews can work from paper for a day; they cannot lose a week of quotes. |
These are teaching examples, not quotes, targets we promise or numbers for your business. Yours come from a conversation about how your business actually runs.
What does an outage cost?
Count two things for each hour you are down: the sales you cannot make, and the wages for people who cannot work. Try your own numbers.
What we do about it
- Ask first. Which systems stop the business if they stop? Those get the tightest numbers.
- Set the RTO and RPO with you and write them down. Tighter numbers cost more, so the job is picking the right number, not the smallest one.
- Build to them. Automatic backups, a copy kept offsite, and the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two kinds of storage, one of them away from your office.
- Test the restore on a schedule. A backup nobody has tried to restore is a hope, not a backup.
- Leave you a one-page plan that says who calls whom and what happens first.