Ask most business owners in Round Rock how long their company could run without its systems and you will get a guess, not a number. In 2026, with ransomware crews moving from first click to full encryption faster than ever, that guess is one of the most expensive unknowns in your business. The IT support Round Rock companies actually need starts by turning that guess into two numbers you can plan around.
Quick Answer: Your recovery time objective, or RTO, is how long your business can afford to be down. Your recovery point objective, or RPO, is how much data you can afford to lose. If your IT provider cannot state both numbers for your business and prove them with a tested restore, you have a hope, not a plan.
Key Takeaways
- RTO is your maximum acceptable downtime. RPO is your maximum acceptable data loss, measured in time, such as the last four hours of work.
- Most companies find out their backups do not work at the worst possible moment. Cyber insurance carrier Coalition reports that 58 percent of organizations discover a partial or complete backup failure during a significant breach.
- Your backup schedule, technology, and budget should flow from your recovery targets, not the other way around.
- A written, tested recovery target turns a ransomware attack from a threat to your company's survival into an expensive but manageable bad week.
What's at Stake
When your systems go down, the real cost is not the ransom. It is every hour your team, your invoices, and your customers sit waiting.
Payroll still runs while nobody can work. Jobs slip, orders stall, and phones ring with questions you cannot answer. For a company with 50 people, even a modest fully loaded labor cost means thousands of dollars evaporating every hour, before you count lost revenue or the customers who quietly move on. Ransomware makes this worse because the downtime is hostile: attackers now routinely target backup systems first, precisely so you have no choice but to negotiate.
That is why the number that matters most is not whether you have backups. It is how fast those backups can put you back in business, and how much recent work they would actually bring back.
Why Central Texas Businesses Face This Challenge
Fast growing companies outgrow their recovery plans quietly, and Central Texas is full of fast growing companies.
Round Rock sits in the middle of one of the fastest growing corridors in the country. Businesses that were 15 people three years ago are 60 people today, running on systems that were set up when a day of downtime was an inconvenience rather than a crisis. The same pattern shows up in Georgetown and across the Austin metro: growth outpaces the recovery plan, and nobody notices because nothing has broken yet.
Many of these companies technically have backups. What they do not have is an answer to the two questions that matter. How long would a full restore actually take? And when it finished, how much recent work would be gone? Without a defined RTO and RPO, those answers get discovered live, during the worst week in the company's history.
How CTTS Helps Round Rock Businesses Set Real Recovery Targets
A recovery plan is a business decision first and a technical project second, and it starts with leadership naming its numbers.
CTTS has been guiding Central Texas organizations through exactly this conversation since 2002. We sit down with your leadership team and work through it system by system: what does an hour of downtime cost here, what does a day cost, and how much recent data could you lose without breaking commitments to customers? Those answers become your RTO and RPO, and everything technical follows from them.
For clients on Complete Care Coverage, our fully managed plan, that means backups engineered to meet your stated targets, monitoring that catches failed backup jobs the day they fail, and scheduled restore tests that prove your recovery time instead of estimating it. It is a large part of why we hold a 96 percent customer satisfaction rating across 159 surveys. We build this for organizations with 10 to 250 employees, where a single bad week of downtime can threaten everything the owner has built.
IT Support Round Rock: Recovery Planning Best Practices
Good recovery planning comes down to a handful of decisions made before the bad day, then proven on a schedule.
What Is a Good RTO for a Small Business?
For most organizations with 10 to 250 employees, a realistic RTO for critical systems is somewhere between 4 and 24 hours, with less critical systems following over the next few days. The right number for you depends on what an hour of downtime costs in your specific business. A medical practice that cannot see patients has a very different tolerance than a construction office that can run on paper for a day. Set the target by cost, not by what your current backup product happens to deliver.
How Much Data Can You Afford to Lose?
Your RPO answers this directly: if your systems were restored from last night's backup, you lose everything since last night, and for many businesses that is an unacceptable answer. Think about your busiest day. Orders entered, invoices sent, client files updated. If losing a full day of that work would mean broken commitments and manual reconstruction, you need backups running every few hours or continuously, not once a night. Your backup frequency should be a mirror of your RPO.
How Often Should You Test Your Recovery Plan?
Test with a real restore of a critical system at least quarterly, and treat the measured time as your actual RTO regardless of what the plan says. A backup job that reports success is not evidence you can recover. It is evidence a file was written. Restore tests catch corrupted backups, missing systems, and painfully slow recovery speeds while they are still cheap problems. This is the single habit that separates companies that survive ransomware calmly from companies that make the news.
Put Your Targets in Writing and Price Them
Write the RTO and RPO for each major system into a one page document that leadership signs, then let your IT provider price what it costs to hit those numbers. Sometimes the honest answer is that a tighter target costs more than it is worth, and leadership consciously accepts a longer recovery. That is fine. What is not fine is discovering an unwritten, untested, unpriced assumption during an actual attack. Insurers increasingly ask for exactly this documentation when underwriting cyber coverage.
Take the Next Step
If you cannot state your company's RTO and RPO today, that is the gap to close this quarter, not after something breaks. Schedule an Executive IT Risk Assessment with CTTS and we will walk through your current backup reality, measure it against what your business actually needs, and give you a clear picture of where you stand. No pressure, no jargon, just the two numbers every owner in Round Rock should know about their own company.
Have Questions? We've Got Answers
What is the difference between RTO and RPO?
RTO is about time down and RPO is about data lost. Your recovery time objective is the maximum time your business can tolerate systems being offline, while your recovery point objective is the maximum amount of recent work you can tolerate losing, measured backward from the failure.
We already pay for backups. Is that not enough?
Paying for backups is not the same as being able to recover, which is why 58 percent of organizations discover a backup failure during a real breach. Until someone performs a timed restore of a critical system and compares the result to your targets, your backup is an assumption rather than a plan.
Does cyber insurance care about recovery objectives?
Increasingly, yes. Carriers now commonly ask about backup architecture, restore testing, and documented recovery plans during underwriting, and weak answers can mean higher premiums, reduced coverage, or denied claims. A written, tested RTO and RPO strengthens both your recovery and your renewal.
Contact CTTS today for IT support and managed services in Austin, TX. Let us handle your IT so you can focus on growing your business. Visit CTTSonline.com or call us at (512) 388-5559 to get started!