RPO and RTO in ServiceNow

RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) are essential concepts in disaster recovery. An awareness of RPO and RTO helps organizations define recovery goals and refine the strategy in place to ensure they are met to mitigate the impact of disaster. 

Such an awareness is essential for organizations using ServiceNow. Many organizations are reliant on IT to manage operations and serve customers, and the ITSM platform plays an essential role in enabling this. 

By understanding and optimizing RTO and RPO, organizations can improve resilience, support operational continuity and maintain customer confidence.

What is RPO?

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) denotes the maximum amount of data an organization can afford to lose during a disruptive event (including system failure, natural disasters, etc.). 

Meeting an RPO typically requires the ability to restore data from a backup.

RPO is expressed in terms of time and determines how “up-to-date” the backup data must be to minimize the impact of data loss on routine operations and service delivery.

RPO will vary between organizations – and even between departments and solutions within organizations – depending on specific needs or requirements such as regulatory compliance, or how frequently data is added to or changed within the platform.

An RPO of 1 hour requires organizations to perform a backup at least once an hour to ensure it can recover data up to one hour before the disaster occurred. 

A longer RPO (e.g. 1 day, 1 week, etc) means more time can pass between backup creation. 

Shorter RPO’s are typically more costly to meet due to the storage capacity and processing power required to create and store backups. 

A longer RPO may help reduce costs but organizations risk losing more recent data.

RPO helps establish two integral aspects:

• Data loss tolerance: How much data the organization can lose before it impacts operations.
• Backup frequency: The required interval between data backups.

Establishing the RPO allows organizations to balance their cost and data recovery needs, ensuring they can resume operations with minimal downtime even in the face of unexpected disruptions.

What is RTO?

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) dictates the maximum time within which an organization’s affected system/application must recover and be fully functional before critical business operations are affected.

Short RTOs require careful disaster planning and even proactive monitoring for the early detection of issues. This allows teams to take the necessary actions with minimal delay between disruption and recovery.

Meeting a RTO requires the ability to restore data within the allotted timeframe. This includes the time it may take to uncover the issue and initiate the backup, as well as complete the backup. 

A backup process that requires the affected solution be taken offline may also affect the RTO, as that would mean operations are more limited during the backup process which may mean reaching the point where critical business operations are seriously affected, sooner.

What is the Difference Between RPO and RTO?

Though both RPO and RTO are integral parts of an organization’s DR planning, they are distinct metrics considering they address different aspects of recovery.

To summarize the above, the difference between RPO and RTO can be considered as such:

While RPO targets the question “How much data can we afford to lose?”, RTO answers the question “How much time can we afford to remain offline?”

• RPO: Primarily focusing on data loss tolerance, it specifies the amount of data that an organization can afford to lose due to a disruption. 
• RTO: Focuses on downtime tolerance, indicating the actual time window within which business resources/systems have to resume normal operations.
  Thus, instead of focusing on data recovery, RTO calculation considers time limitations on application downtime (although recovering data may be a prerequisite to the application being in a usable state).

Why RPO and RTO are Important for ServiceNow Users

ServiceNow is often a business critical solution. As such, extended downtime could mean losing business-critical data, poor service delivery, and dissatisfied customers, often creating a ripple effect through the wider enterprise. 

Naturally, this makes data loss and downtime significant concerns in ServiceNow, as the impact of such issues will limit an organization’s productivity and service delivery capacity.

Below are the key reasons why establishing and meeting RPO and RTOs is essential for ServiceNow users:

Prolonged operational disruption

Prolonged downtime can disrupt workflows, delay project timelines, and affect stakeholder/customer trust. Teams dependent on real-time data may face productivity loss due to their inability to access the right data at the right time.

Data integrity and recovery challenges

Generally, rebuilding lost data can be challenging, particularly if teams have no recent backups. This leads to data inconsistencies, missing or inaccurate records, and stale data, hindering reporting and analysis efforts. Plus, data recovery efforts consume significant IT resources and divert focus from strategic projects.

Financial Losses

Downtime and data loss can have severe financial repercussions, including revenue losses, penalties for unmet SLAs, and potentially costly recovery processes. Extended service disruption can impact customer satisfaction and increase churn rates.

Regulatory and compliance risks

Many organizations handling sensitive data operate under strict guidelines and regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, etc. 

Since data loss events can adversely impact business continuity and data integrity (especially if critical compliance data is compromised or inaccessible), it may result in non-compliance, legal penalties, and reputational damage.

ServiceNow Limitations That Affect RPO and RTO

While ServiceNow provides backup and recovery capabilities out-of-the-box, there are some inherent limitations that impact organizations capacity to meet RPO and RTO. The common theme between these limitations is a lack of user control over the process.

Lengthy restoration process and instance downtime.

Restoring from a ServiceNow-created backup is a lengthy process. Starting with its initiation, users are required to contact ServiceNow via a support ticket, to restore a backup on their behalf. 

This involves several rounds of communication, including an approval stage where the organization must accept the risk of data loss when restoring from a ServiceNow backup.

After initiation, the actual restoration process may take over six hours, during which the instance remains offline, and users have limited access to the Platform. Due to these reasons, ServiceNow recommends restoration via their default capabilities as ​​a last resort. 

Lack of control over backup scheduling

ServiceNow does not allow users to define their own backup schedule or create on-demand backups. 

This means for users reliant on ServiceNow-created backups, meeting the RPO is out of their hands. ServiceNow creates full backups every seven days and differential backups every 24 hours. 

That means the platform can meet an RPO of 24 hours at most, assuming the affected data is available in the differential backup. 

No visibility into backup schedule

The lack of visibility into the backup schedule is also a huge issue. ServiceNow states that “the system finds the best time for backups within a 24-hour period and customers and ServiceNow cannot modify that time.” 

This creates an inherent uncertainty around the availability of backups and means organizations can’t factor the backup schedule into their operations. 

For example, with visibility of, or control over the backup schedule, an organization can decide to perform tasks with increased risk of data loss such as an update, closer to the point in time of backup creation. 

No control over backup retention

ServiceNow’s short backup retention period of 14 days is also an issue. It means organizations have limited time to detect and respond to data loss events. 

In case the IT team discovers the issue outside this brief window, they cannot recover lost data via ServiceNow’s default backup and restore capabilities. 

This can significantly impact RTO as the organization may have to spend considerable time rebuilding and reentering lost data.

How Perspectium Helps Organizations Meet Their RPO and RTO

The above limitations highlight a fundamental mismatch between ServiceNow’s backup and restore capabilities and robust disaster recovery planning that aligns with an organization’s RPO and RTO. 

Fortunately, ServiceNow users can take control of ServiceNow backups via the natively installed application Snapshot. 

Created by ServiceNow’s founding developer, David Loo, Snapshot is purpose-built to help organizations take control of the ServiceNow backup process. Working like a time machine for ServiceNow, Snapshot allows users to:

• Exercise greater control over backup creation, setting their own schedule and creating backups on-demand.
• Create unlimited backups and retain them indefinitely.
• Restore from Snapshot created backups quickly, without instance downtime.
• Restore in full or customize the content of the restore with granular control.

With this increased control of backup creation and retention, Snapshot users are better able to meet their RPO and RTO requirements than those reliant on ServiceNow-created backups.

Eager to learn more about Snapshot or even see it in action? Contact us today!