Understanding RTO and RPO

There are two critical terms we need to understand when it comes to backup and recovery, RTO and RPO. These two terms are used to help understand the requirements for a business in terms of the speed of recovery required in case of a failure and how much data could be lost in a worst-case scenario. Correct use of these two values will allow you to ensure your backup and recovery strategy meets these requirements.

Let's first look at RTO.

RTO

RTO is the maximum amount of time a system can be unavailable before the impact to the business becomes too severe and a large amount of damage is done. The damage could be financial, legal, or reputational. With RTO, we are focusing on how quickly the database will be returned to a usable state, and depending on the type of failure, we may end up with different RTO values. For example, imagine that you have a Multi-AZ RDS instance. Your primary database suffers a failure due to an underlying network issue...