Calculating RTO and RPO
Summarize
Summary of Calculating RTO and RPO
The Business Continuity Management (BCM) application in ServiceNow provides a structured process to calculate Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) during a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). This process helps organizations assess the maximum acceptable downtime and data loss for critical business services and IT systems.
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BCM administrators configure impact categories, impact ratings, and assessment questionnaires. Business users and IT owners respond to these assessments, enabling the system to calculate RTO and RPO values based on their inputs and predefined thresholds.
BCM Setup and Workflow
- BCM Administrator Role: Defines impact categories, sets impact ratings (e.g., Low, Moderate, High), configures thresholds for tolerable and non-tolerable impacts, and sets disruption durations.
- Assessment Process: Business users and IT owners complete assessment questionnaires in the BIA component, responding to RTO and RPO-related questions.
- Calculation Logic: RPO is derived from the highest category score from responses, mapped to a timeframe (e.g., "Immediately"). RTO is calculated based on the lowest tolerable downtime across impact categories, considering disruption durations tied to impact ratings and tolerability settings.
Key Features
- Impact Ratings Configuration: Impact ratings are assigned numeric values (Low=1, Moderate=2, High=3) and tolerability flags, which influence RTO calculations.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Assessment: IT analysts estimate acceptable data loss windows via the RPO assessment, with system calculations using score-to-timeframe mappings.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) Assessment: Business users estimate acceptable downtime for business services, with RTO determined by the first non-tolerable impact duration or maximum RTO if all impacts are tolerable.
- Dynamic RTO Calculation: RTO updates automatically as disruption durations change in impact categories, ensuring the BIA reflects current risk tolerance.
Practical Application and Outcomes
By following this process, ServiceNow customers can:
- Establish clear, measurable objectives for recovery time and data loss limits aligned with business priorities.
- Leverage BCM administrator-configured assessments to gather input from relevant stakeholders efficiently.
- Automatically calculate RTO and RPO values that inform recovery planning and prioritization.
- Assign recovery tiers based on RTO values to classify business services by criticality, such as Mission Critical, Business Critical, Essential, or Non-Essential.
This structured approach ensures that recovery objectives are quantifiable, traceable, and integrated into the overall BCM process, enabling organizations to prepare effectively for disruptions.
The BCM application provides an assessment questionnaire for calculating the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) in the business impact analysis (BIA). As a pre-requisite to the BIA, BCM administrator defines the impact ratings and sets up the assessment questions. After receiving the responses to the assessment, the BCM application calculates the RTO and RPO.
BCM dependency tree
Before calculating the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) in the business impact analysis (BIA), verify that all the required BCM applications are installed.
BCM implementation
Setting up the impact ratings to evaluate an impact category is a crucial step in business continuity management. To grasp the importance of configuring these impact categories, refer to the steps needed for implementing the BCM process, as outlined in the checklist.
- BIA workflow
When a business impact analysis (BIA) owner submits the BIA for a review, the BIA is updated to the review state. The BIA owner responds to the questions in the assessment questionnaire. If you are an IT analyst or 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 BCM administrator, the questions are displayed in the Recovery point objective assessment tab of the BIA.
A sample BIA workflow is shown in the example.
Responding to the assessments
The business users and IT owners perform business impact analysis by responding to the assessments in the BIA component in the BCM UIB Workspace. A sample view of the Assessments tab is shown in the example.
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.
Administrator view for configuring impact category and ratings
BCM administrators configure the assessment questionnaire to include one or more impact ratings such as Low, Moderate, or High for an impact category. The Impact
Ratings related list is displayed in the Impact Category record as shown in the example.
- Low = 1
- Moderate = 2
- High = 3
Based on the configuration set up by BCM administrator, the questions are displayed in the Recovery point objective assessment tab as shown in the example.
Calculation of RPO score for the BIA with examples
Consider the scenario where each question response has a numeric value. The application calculates the category score for each RPO impact category based on the highest response value.
The application selects the highest category score from all the RPO categories. In the example, the highest category score is 40.
The application uses the Score Timeframe Mapping, defined at the template level, to determine the appropriate timeframe value. In the example, the category score is 40, which falls between the lower and upper threshold scores. The timeframe mapped to this score is "Immediately." Therefore, the system-calculated RPO value is "Immediately."
Recovery time objective assessment
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 is shown in the example.
Calculation of RTO score for the BIA with examples
Consider the scenario where each question response is assigned a numeric value. The application identifies the highest tolerable value for each RTO Impact category.
The application then calculates the “Tolerable downtime” value for each RTO Impact category as the Impact rating with a value higher than the highest tolerable value. If no value exists, the application uses the maximum RTO value (that is defined at the Impact category) as the “Tolerable downtime.” The system calculates the RTO score based on the lowest “Tolerable downtime” value from all RTO impact categories.
In the example, the RTO score based on the lowest “Tolerable downtime” value is 8 Hours.
Sample RTO calculation
| Scenario | Non-tolerable impact | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Scenario 1 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. |
If the administrator has specified that Low regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO). In this example, the disruption duration for the 01 - Low impact rating is set to 4 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) for the impact category is above 4 hours. Even if the moderate impact disruption duration is shorter, the calculation selects the value from the first alphanumerically sorted impact rating that has the Tolerable field set to false. |
| Scenario 2 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. |
If the administrator has specified that Moderate regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO). In this example, the disruption duration for 02 - Moderate impact is set to 24 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) for the impact category is above 24 hours. |
| Scenario 3 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. |
If the administrator has specified that High regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO) as shown in the example. In the tabular example, the disruption duration for 03 - High impact is set to 72 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective for the impact category is above 72 hours. |
| Scenario 4 | The Tolerable field for the Low, Moderate, and High impact ratings is set to true. |
If the administrator has set all the impact ratings as tolerable, the value specified in the Maximum RTO value field in the template is selected as the recovery time objective (RTO). In the example, the administrator has set all the impact ratings as tolerable. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) is one month according to the value specified in the Maximum RTO value field. |
- Calculation of overall impact assessment result for a BIA
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When you update the Disruption Duration of an impact category, the RTO of the BIA is automatically updated. The RTO of the BIA is set as the lowest tolerable downtime from each impact category.
For example, consider a BIA having four impact categories – Legal, Reputation, Workforce, and Regulatory. When you update the disruption duration value of the legal impact category, then the RTO value of the BIA is recalculated based on the lowest tolerable disruption duration from each impact category. The Recovery Tier varies from organization to organization and is set based on the recalculated RTO value.
RTO value Recovery Tier Immediate Mission Critical 1 Hour Mission Critical 4 Hours Mission Critical 8 Hours Business Critical 24 Hours Business Critical 72 Hours Essential 1 Week Essential 2 Weeks Non-Essential 1 Month Non-Essential