Ensuring business continuity in the event of a cyber incident or technical failure directly depends on the correct definition of RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) parameters. Many organizations in Romania set these metrics based on unrealistic expectations, without taking into account the technical and budgetary limitations of the IT infrastructure. A correct approach aligns business requirements with real data and system restoration capabilities.
Recommendations for establishing realistic RTO and RPO metrics
- Asset and data classification: Identify critical systems and prioritize them based on the financial and operational impact of a potential outage. Not all applications require a recovery time in the order of minutes.
- Assessment of existing infrastructure: Analyze bandwidth, storage system performance, and backup architecture before promising a minimum RPO. Data transfer speed directly dictates backup frequency.
- Periodic testing of restoration scenarios: A theoretical continuity plan does not guarantee actual recovery. Run periodic disaster recovery simulations to measure the actual time required to restore services to operation.
- Correlating the budget with the established objectives: Reducing RTO and RPO to values close to zero requires significant investments in active replication and geographical redundancy solutions. The allocated budget must reflect the potential cost of downtime.
- Clear documentation of procedures: Ensure that technical teams have access to updated workflows so that the restoration phase is not delayed by administrative confusion.
Defining RTO and RPO metrics based on technical reality represents both a cybersecurity best practice and a legal necessity. Under European directives such as NIS2 or the DORA regulation for the financial sector, operational resilience and proven recovery capability in the event of an incident become mandatory compliance requirements for companies in Romania.
Security News, in your inbox
New News articles, with their full text and a link to the website. One daily email at 09:00 Romania time. No new articles in your chosen language, no email.
