The More Important a System Is, the More Redundancy Matters
It's not one-size-fits-all.
Not every application in your business is mission-critical.
Some systems can go down for a few days, and no one will notice.
Others? Even a few hours offline can grind operations to a halt.
That’s why redundancy, by which I mean the ability to quickly recover or continue operations, matters more as systems become more important.
Understanding RPO and RTO
Two concepts guide how to think about redundancy:
RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How much data you can afford to lose if something goes wrong. In other words, how far back can you roll your systems without major disruption?
RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How fast you can get your systems back online after an outage?
Both are essential metrics for building a resilient IT environment.
Why It Matters
If your email system is down for an hour, it’s inconvenient.
If your ERP, billing platform, or customer portal is down for a day, it’s catastrophic.
That’s why every organization should take an application-by-application approach to redundancy.
At Reboot, we work with clients to evaluate each critical system and define:
What downtime actually costs the business.
How quickly the system must recover.
Whether data recovery or uptime is the greater priority.
From there, we design the right level of protection, whether it’s redundant servers, cloud failover, or automated backup processes.
The ROI of Resilience
Redundancy can sound like extra cost, but it’s really about risk reduction.
A 2024 Oxford Economics study estimated that downtime costs an organization an average of $9,000 per minute, or $540,000 per hour.
Recovery time often determines whether a company experiences minor inconvenience or major loss.
The key is knowing which systems deserve that level of investment.
Final Thought
You don’t need every system to have enterprise-grade redundancy.
But you do need a plan.
Because when it comes to IT resilience, the question isn’t if something will fail.
It’s how ready you’ll be when it does.