You may have seen RPO and RTO being mentioned in Disaster Recovery (DR) requirements from customers. What do they stand for? How do you know if your solution proposal will meet those requirements? What aspect of your solution design / architecture does this impact?

• RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum amount of time for which your customer can lose data in the event of a disaster. This determines how often you backup data. Because worst case, the disaster may happen just before your scheduled backup finishes. This is not just for planning data, but also for actuals and audit trail data.
• RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the amount of time elapsed before your DR (alternate site) environment is up and running after the disaster happened. This determines how fast your server should be able to start up from a backup copy.

I hope next time you see RPO and RTO, you have a better understanding of what it means.