In order to build more resilient applications, you need to know if your apps are or aren’t resilient in the first place. The question is: How?

When it comes to resiliency, there are two metrics that matter most. And they both come down to one thing: time. So, what are these metrics and how can they give you insight into your application resiliency?

How is Application Resilience Measured?

The definition of application resiliency focuses on continued functionality, even when failures occur.

According to Google Cloud, “A resilient app is one that continues to function despite failures of system components,” adding that, “Resilience also extends to people and culture.” So your apps need to be able to recover from failures of all kinds with minimal downtime and data loss. And when downtime does happen, every second counts.

That’s why metrics focused on time can help you measure your resilience. There are two in particular that matter most: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).

RTO

RTO is the maximum amount of time that your app can be down before your business is significantly impacted. Instead of measuring the actual length of outages, it’s a goal based on how much “acceptable” downtime your organization can withstand.

Generally, RTO takes into account the time it takes to be fully operational after an unexpected outage. Like Google pointed out, that involves more than just your data recovery time, such as:

• Your people: How long it takes to get the right people to recover your application
• Your backup access: How much time it takes to access your data
• Your transfer time: How long your transfer process takes
• Your system restart time: The time it takes to relaunch applications and load data into production

MTTR

While RTO is your agreed-upon business objective for acceptable downtime, your mean time to recover is an average of the actual time it takes you to recover after that downtime.

So what does this have to do with application resiliency again? MTTR can show you exactly how resilient your applications currently are by looking at actual downtime. Then, RTO can help you determine how resilient they should be.

As you can see, RTO and MTTR are dependent on each other. And as you implement processes or tools to help improve your MTTR, you can adjust your RTO to reflect the speed.

How Resilient Are Your Applications?

Want to learn more about how to speed up your MTTR and getting your apps to the level of resiliency you need? Check out Trilio’s blog to stay in the know.

Also check out TrilioVault for Kubernetes today to make resiliency a reality for your business.