IT Consulting from the Trenches

RECOVERY POINT OBJECTIVE, RECOVERY TIME OBJECTIVE, and WORKFORCE CONTINUITY

Three important aspects of any disaster recovery and/or business continuity plan are the so-called Recovery Point Objective, Recovery Time Objective, and the Workforce Continuity Plan.

In a September 11 post, I recounted five questions that the client must answer with clarity. Those questions should start the mind thinking about the likely and unlikely disasters they face and how they would respond to them.

Those five questions again are:

1. How will disaster impact your key assets?
2. What are the most likely disasters that could strike your business?
3. Which systems must be restored in priority sequence?
4. What are the possible points of failure in your current systems?
5. How much will you budget for disaster recovery?

Several readers noted that I missed at least three more important aspects. Although I originally felt that those aspects would have arisen during the brainstorming part of answering those five questions anyway, I decided that these aspects are important enough that they should be listed explicitly.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

This measures the amount of potential data loss that you can afford or are willing to lose. For example, would you be willing to lose a week's worth of accounting work? Possibly, since that work can be repeated. On the other hand, would you be willing to lose even a day's worth of sales transactions? Probably not, since it would be difficult, impossible, or embarrassing to try to reconstruct the sales transactions of a day.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

This measures the period of downtime you are willing to tolerate before your systems come back online. This is the length of time that elapses from the minute a disruption occurs to the minute it is restored. Similar to the RPO, your RTO may vary depending upon the importance of the system. For example, you may be willing to have an RTO of one week for your accounting system but only an RTO of one day for your sales and invoicing system.

Workforce Continuity Plan

Without your workforce, you cannot conduct your business. Have you identified the key people in your workforce? Do they know their roles in the event of an emergency? What facilities or equipment should be made available to them so that they can go about their work? Where will they work from? How will you handle medical and safety issues? Above all, how will you ensure that they can communicate?

To illustrate how these aspects are linked, consider email. Everyone relies on email. In fact, wouldn’t you agree that your email system is a critical system? Not only does it allow you to communicate, it also contains a lot of important documents. These documents may be in the form of email attachments or the body of the email itself may be the important message itself. Your email system figures prominently in your Workforce Continuity Plan as well as in prioritizing your RPO and RTO.

I hope the inclusion of these three aspects will help you facilitate your own planning process even more.