RTO, RPO, and recovery tiers

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of RTO, RPO, and Recovery Tiers

    Organizations must assess their business processes for potential downtime due to disruptive events. Understanding RTO, RPO, and recovery tiers helps in classifying these processes and determining acceptable limits for recovery time and data loss to minimize operational impact.

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    Key Features

    • Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum time required for recovery after an outage. Business users can estimate RTO through assessments provided in the BCM UIB Workspace.
    • Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum allowable data loss. IT owners can assess RPO using specific evaluations in the BIA component.
    • Recovery Tiers: Business applications can be categorized into recovery tiers based on their RTO values, ranging from Mission Critical to Non-Critical. BCM administrators can configure these tiers to align with organizational expectations and support levels.
    • Recovery Timeframe: The duration from the occurrence of a disruptive event to the resumption of normal operations. Administrators can set different timeframes to reflect varying recovery needs.

    Key Outcomes

    By effectively utilizing RTO, RPO, and recovery tiers, customers can ensure better preparedness for potential disruptions. This leads to minimized data loss, reduced recovery times, and clearer operational continuity plans. For further configuration guidance on recovery tiers and timeframes, refer to the relevant sections in the Business Continuity Management application.

    Due to unforeseen disruptive events, the business processes in your organization can face a downtime. It is important to classify your business processes in the recovery tiers and calculate the amount of time and amount of data loss that your organization can handle without significant effect on the operations.

    Recovery time objective

    Recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of time a computer, system, network, or application takes to recover after an outage event or data loss without causing much effect to your business operations.

    The business users and IT owners can perform business impact analysis and technical impact analysis respectively by responding to the assessment in the BIA component in the BCM UIB Workspace. A sample view of the Assessments tab is shown in the example.

    Assessments in the BIA.

    If you are the business user, you can estimate the recovery time objective for your business services and processes by responding to the Recovery time objective assessment in the Assessments tab. The questions are displayed in the Recovery time objective assessment tab according to the configuration set up by BCM administrators. A sample Recovery time objective assessment with demo data is shown in the example.

    Recovery time objective assessment.

    Recovery point objective

    Recovery point objective (RPO) defines the maximum acceptable data loss that a business process can handle without significant effect on operations.

    If you are the IT owner, you can estimate the recovery point objective for your data applications and systems by responding to the Recovery point objective assessment in the BIA. Based on the configuration set up by the BCM administrator, the questions are displayed in the Recovery time objective assessment tab as shown in the example.

    Recovery point objective assessment.

    Recovery tier

    With BCM administrator role, classify a set of business applications that follow a similar range of recovery time objective (RTO) values in one type of recovery tier. For example, for the Mission Critical recovery tiers, recovery time objectives can be Immediately, one Hour, and four Hours.

    The recovery tiers and their associated recovery time objectives are displayed in the example.

    Recovery tiers and their configured recovery time objectives.

    BCM administrators can configure a recovery tier and set its recovery time objective as shown in the example.

    Recovery tier and its recovery time objective.

    Recovery tiers are also associated with other organizational expectations such as levels of support, escalation, and communication.

    Recovery tiers are used in the areas:
    • BIA scores and impact assessment result
    • Element recovery times
    Although there is no limitation to the number of the recovery tiers, an organization can set 4 to 6 recovery tiers. Recovery tiers are automatically calculated on BIAs and element RTO by selecting the nearest recovery tier maximum time.
    Recovery tiers can be classified as per their importance and criticality:
    • Mission Critical
    • Business Critical
    • Essential
    • Non-essential
    • Critical
    • Non-Critical

    Recovery tier configuration by the administrators

    For more information on how to configure a recovery tier in the Business Continuity Management application, see Configure recovery tiers for BIA.

    Recovery timeframe

    You can set up the recovery timeframe for a recovery tier. It is the timeframe that starts from when a disruptive event happens to the time when your business can resume usual operations. The BCM administrator can configure the recovery timeframe and its start time. You can configure different recovery timeframes as shown in the example:
    • Immediately
    • 1 Hour
    • 4 Hours
    • 8 Hours
    • 24 Hours
    • 72 Hours
    • 1 Week
    • 2 weeks
    The example shows the configured recovery timeframes in the Business Continuity Management application. Recovery timeframes.

    The example shows the configuration of a recovery timeframe in the Business Continuity Management application. New recovery timeframe.

    For more information on how to configure a recovery timeframe in the Business Continuity Management application, see Set up recovery timeframe for a recovery tier.