RPO and MBCO: data and the minimum service

RPO says nothing about downtime

The RPO — recovery point objective — answers one question: how much data are we willing to lose? It is expressed in time for convenience: a four-hour RPO means the last four hours of input may disappear.

The commonest confusion treats RPO as a variant of RTO. They are independent dimensions:

• Short RTO, long RPO: the service restarts fast but on slightly stale data. Acceptable for a brochure site, an intranet, a reporting tool.
• Long RTO, short RPO: recovery takes time but nothing is lost. Typical of an accounting or legal system.
• Both short: expensive, and still achievable.
• Both long: perfectly legitimate for most of an organisation's systems.

Validating an RPO honestly

An RPO is not validated by comparing it with a market benchmark. It is validated by calculating the re-keying volume it implies.

The method fits in three questions:

1. How many transactions, cases or entries does the activity process per hour at peak?
2. Can those items be reconstructed from an external source — email, paper, a third party's system, a bank statement?
3. How many person-hours does re-keying take, and are those people available while also handling the current flow?

The MBCO: the number that speaks to the board

The MBCO — minimum business continuity objective — is the service level the organisation commits to maintaining through the disruption. It is the only one of these four acronyms expressed in business language, and that is exactly why it is the most useful in an executive committee.

Some real formulations:

• "Handle 100% of life-threatening emergencies and 30% of scheduled activity" (healthcare provider);
• "Execute payments above €100,000 and suspend the rest" (financial institution);
• "Serve orders from the twenty clients representing 60% of revenue" (manufacturer);
• "Maintain production on a single line, single shift" (food processing).

A well-formed MBCO does three things: it sizes minimum resources, it gives prioritisation criteria that can be applied without case-by-case arbitration, and it lets you communicate honestly with clients from the first hour.

Without an MBCO, every manager improvises their own prioritisation on the day — and improvised prioritisations rarely converge.