Recovery time objective
Also known as RTO
The maximum time a system can be unavailable before the impact becomes unacceptable.
RTO is a business decision, not a technical one. It should come from what the outage costs per hour, and it drives how much you need to spend on recovery capability.
Different systems warrant different targets. The clinical or production system might need an hour; the marketing site can wait a week, and paying for an hour there is wasted money.
Where this comes up
Recovery time objective sits inside our backup and disaster recovery work. If you are trying to work out what this means for your own environment rather than in the abstract, that is the page worth reading next, and a short call will get you a straight answer faster than either.
Related terms
Recovery point objective The maximum amount of data, measured in time, you can afford to lose. Disaster recovery The process and capability for restoring IT systems after a major failure or destructive event. Business continuity plan The plan for keeping essential business functions running during and after a disruption. Failover Switching operation to a standby system when the primary one fails.