Defining recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) helps MSPs and clients agree on realistic recovery expectations. RTO sets the required recovery time for systems, while RPO specifies the scope of acceptable data loss.
Without documented RTO and RPO targets, MSPs can accidentally misalign recovery priorities, leaving critical systems and data vulnerable.
Strategies to align backup planning practices with RTO and RPO
Right off the bat, recovery expectations should match the appropriate recovery objectives in accordance with system and data criticality. This helps reduce wasted resources on misaligned recovery strategies, making recovery outcomes more predictable and aligned to client requirements.
📌 Use Cases: Defining RTO/RPO targets aligns MSP resources with their client’s business priorities. Documenting systems and data into tiers helps MSPs meet SLA commitments while strengthening clients’ business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategies.
📌 Prerequisites:
- Access to backup logs
- Centralized documentation platform (e.g., NinjaOne Docs)
- Clear view of client systems and business processes
- Documented asset inventory
- Agreed upon RTO and RPO definition
Strategy #1: Define standard backup tiers
Each endpoint serves a specific function within an environment. Sorting endpoints into tiers helps reflect their criticality in case of an outage, downtime, or data loss. Creating a standard backup tier for a client ensures that recovery strategies are specifically tailored according to an endpoint’s importance.
💡 Note: Keep recovery objectives in line with your actual backup capabilities. (See ⚠️ Things to look out for.)
Sample standard backup tiers with RTO and RPO targets
Aligning systems on tiers according to their perceived business impact helps clients visualize their recovery objectives during an outage.
| Tier | Description | RTO Target | RPO Target | Examples |
| 0 | Critical services | < 15 mins | < 1 min | Payment gateways, kiosks, and transactional databases |
| 1 | Core organizational services | 1 to 4 hours | 5 to 15 minutes | CRMs and file servers |
| 2 | Department tools | 4 to 12 hours | 30 to 60 minutes | HR tool and reporting dashboards |
| 3 | Low-use systems | 12 to 24 hours | 4 to 24 hours | File archives |
Strategy #2: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis to map systems
A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) provides insights into different criteria for tier assignment. Technicians can leverage BIAs in evaluating systems to know which tier they fall into.
Knowing systems’ criticality helps clients determine tolerable downtime and data loss thresholds. This helps avoid misclassifications, as a large system isn’t necessarily critical, and a small one isn’t necessarily low-priority.
⚠️ Important: Inaccurate BIAs lead to incorrect tier assignments. (See ⚠️ Things to look out for.)
Key BIA criteria for tier assignment
- Financial or operational loss from downtime. Assess a system’s impact on revenue, transactions, and core operations in case of downtime and data loss. For example, a POS system outage can potentially halt sales, classifying it as tier 0.
- Compliance or regulatory risks. Systems that strictly observe external regulations, such as HIPAA data backup requirements, may require faster recovery times and frequency.
- Number of affected users. The higher the number of affected users during an outage, the greater its organizational impact will be. Simply put, a system that affects all employees requires a higher RTO/RPO tier than a system used by a small team.
- Recovery dependencies. Systems that critical processes rely on require the same level of urgency as critical systems themselves. Identifying these dependencies and ensuring they fall in urgent recovery tiers streamlines backup strategies.
Strategy #3: Document RTO and RPO using a client-facing template
After sorting systems into different tiers, MSPs should reflect those changes in an easily understandable format and language. A backup strategy documentation serves as a reference during an outage, ensuring processes follow agreed-upon objectives.
Visualizing recovery objectives offers transparency to clients during their onboarding process. Incorporate documentation in QBRs to clarify how existing backup strategies align with clients’ operational needs.
Sample client-facing documentation
| System | Tier | Expected recovery time (RTO) | Data loss threshold (RPO) | Notes |
| QuickBooks Server | 1 | 2 hours | 1 hour | Full system image; backed up hourly |
| Archive NAS | 3 | 24 hours | 12 hours | Nightly backup to cold storage |
| Microsoft 365 Mailboxes | 2 | 4 to 12 hours | 30 minutes | Covered by NinjaOne Microsoft 365 backup |
Strategy #4: Align backup strategies with each tier
It’s vital for MSPs to ensure that backup frequency can accommodate the required recovery time and data loss thresholds set by clients. For example, you can’t promise 15-minute RPO if backup cadence only runs hourly.
MSPs should also allocate resources cost-effectively, ensuring backup SLAs are met without spending a fortune. High-performance backup solutions are ideal for critical systems, while non-critical systems should utilize low-cost repositories.
Sample tiers and corresponding backup strategies
- Tier 0. Recovery in this tier should be quick, as it contains operationally essential systems. Solutions could incorporate continuous replication or failover clusters to maximize uptime.
- Tier 1. To prevent workflow disruption, put systems that support daily business functions within this tier. Technicians can incorporate frequent image backups and snapshots to accommodate this tier’s RTO and RPO.
- Tier 2. Reserve this for systems that can tolerate longer recovery windows. Hourly incrementals can reduce backup load, paired with daily full backups to ensure restore points.
- Tier 3. It’s recommended that rarely accessed systems and files be included in this tier. Use low-cost cold storage solutions, as longer restore times for archived files are generally acceptable.
Strategy #5: Verify RTO and RPO compliance using light validation checks
Once all backup strategies are sorted into tiers, the next ideal step would be to test if they are working. Through lightweight testing, technicians can flag backup policy drifts, ensuring systems remain compliant with their assigned RPO/RTO tier.
Technicians can execute test runs and review backup logs to check if the backup cadence meets the RPO target. Regarding RTO, performing manual and scheduled restore tests helps provide metrics to measure actual recovery time.
Data gathered through logs, regular testing, and dashboard monitoring provides MSPs with actionable insights, preventing issues before they become incidents. This helps maintain service quality by consistently improving backup strategies using low-overhead methods.
Strategy #6: Embed backup planning in client conversations and reviews
The needs of clients evolve as their organizations grow. Transparent and proactive communication of backup strategies, from client onboarding to QBRs, helps support their improvement.
Points to discuss during onboarding
Setting initial RTO and RPO targets based on client priorities and technical capabilities should be done during onboarding. Doing so can help clients understand what their existing recovery strategies look like before and after an incident.
Quarterly business reviews
Document which systems met recovery goals and which didn’t using data collected via restore logs, dashboards, and tests. This provides transparent analysis that highlights successful jobs and troubleshoots gaps, helping clients make informed decisions about tier adjustments.
Post-incident retrospect
Recovery plans should improve based on their recent performance, not through assumptions and simulations. After an incident or outage, compare restore performance and recovery objectives to improve on existing backup strategies and tier assignments.
Documentation and audits
Incorporate any changes to tier assignments, RTO/RPO targets, or strategies in reports along with their rationale. Archive these reports to generate a clear audit trail for internal teams and clients during reviews.
⚠️ Things to look out for
| Risks | Potential Consequences | Reversals |
| Overpromising on RTO and RPO targets | Setting unfeasible recovery targets leads to SLA breaches and client dissatisfaction. | Review restore logs and backup intervals and readjust tier assignments accordingly. Inform clients about RTO/RPO changes before implementing them. |
| Assigning the wrong backup tier | Wrong backup tier assignments can leave critical systems vulnerable during outages. | Re-run Business Impact Analysis to identify gaps and misallocations, then reassign systems to the appropriate tier based on criticality. |
| Lack of validation checks | Backup and recovery performance can drift over time, causing misalignment between service delivery and target recovery objectives. | Schedule light validations to regularly assess RTO and RPO compliance. This helps technicians to proactively spot drifts before they become huge problems for a client. |
| Poor client communication | Poor communication leaves clients unaware of recovery limitations and changes, potentially causing them to lose confidence in their MSP. | Include recovery objectives during onboarding and QBR dialogues. Document validation results and any changes to maintain a clear audit trail for clients. |
NinjaOne integration for tiered backup solutions
NinjaOne offers unified tagging, documentation, and reporting solutions in a single pane of glass. This helps MSPs deliver SLA-compliant backup strategies to clients, ensuring recovery and visibility through automation.
- Custom fields. For better visibility, leverage custom fields to tag assets with their assigned tier and specific recovery objectives.
- Real-time alerting. Create custom alerts to quickly notify assigned technicians when endpoint backup expectations aren’t met.
- Structured documentation. Input RTO and RPO compliance requirements and runbooks per client and share them across technicians.
- Reporting & Analytics. Choose from numerous templates to consolidate raw IT data into meaningful reports that reflect the value you provide to clients.
Quick-Start Guide
NinjaOne SaaS Backup allows you to set clear expectations for Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) through flexible retention policies.
Key features include:
- Backup Frequency:
- Emails: 12x per day
- OneDrive/Google Drive: 1x per day
- SharePoint/Shared Drive: 3x per day
- Groups & Teams: 3x per day
- Retention Policies:
- You can create granular retention schedules with options for:
- Hourly backups
- Daily backups
- Weekly backups
- Monthly backups
- You can create granular retention schedules with options for:
- Retention Examples:
- Can maintain two months of backups by:
- Keeping hourly backups for 7 days
- Daily backups for next 14 days
- Weekly backups for 4 weeks
- Monthly backups for 2 months
- Can maintain two months of backups by:
- Additional Features:
- Incremental backup captures only changes since last backup
- 256-bit AES encryption
- Supports point-in-time restores
- Flexible restore options (create copy, append, overwrite, skip)
This allows organizations to set clear, customized RTO/RPO expectations across different backup tiers and data types.
Set clients for success through well-defined RTO and RPO
A successful backup strategy is a two-way street; as clients openly communicate organizational goals, MSPs must share recovery performance targets. Mutual transparency helps both sides align recovery expectations and incident response.
Good backup strategies should evolve as clients expand. By incorporating well-defined target objectives into onboarding, QBRs, and post-incident reviews, resilience and accountability become a joint venture between MSPs and clients.
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