Recovery time objective, or RTO, is defined as the duration of time that passes between a serious failure occurring and the resumption of business operations. Because it functions as a target in a business continuity plan, an organization hopes to be back up and running by the specified RTO.
Calculating a recovery time objective involves assessing downtime costs, such as service level agreements, reputation loss, and customer dissatisfaction. Establishing realistic disaster recovery targets depends on weighing financial losses, since downtime can ultimately be measured in dollars. While a small, local business can weather downtime longer with fewer consequences, a large company like Google stands to lose exponentially more the longer its downtime persists.
Understanding Recovery Time Objective
Recovery time objective differs from recovery point objective, which represents the maximum amount of time covered by system backups. While a recovery point objective focuses on how far back backups go, the recovery time objective focuses on how long it takes to restore operations. When a serious failure occurs, organizations rely on disaster recovery strategies that utilize well-protected offsite copies of crucial data to rebuild operations.
Establishing Business Continuity Plans
Creating a sustainable plan for preventing downtime requires balancing recovery time objective and recovery point objective values, though maximizing one objective does not always mean compromising the other. A good disaster recovery plan depends on a solid backup solution at its heart, alongside other important recovery aspects tailored to the specific business type and recovery strategy. Businesses can execute best practices by planning ahead to ensure they know how to rebuild after various types of failures.
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