What Is RTO (Recovery Time Objective)?    

 What is RTO (Recovery Time Objective)?  

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable length of time that a tool or process can be offline following a disruption. RTO is a crucial part of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. It determines how quickly a company needs to restore its operations to avoid a significant impact.

For example, an eCommerce company might set an RTO of 1 hour for their website, as every minute of downtime directly affects sales and customer satisfaction. On the other hand, a small business might set an RTO of 4 hours for their internal email system, as a short outage would be inconvenient but not have a significant impact on revenue.

Why Is RTO Important?  

It’s essential to consider RTO when planning your recovery strategy. RTO is important because it:

• Sets Expectations: By establishing an RTO, organizations can set clear recovery objectives and ensure that they restore business operations within an acceptable time-frame after an incident. 

• Aligns IT with business priorities: RTOs ensure that the IT team understands and prioritizes recovery efforts based on the most critical business functions.
  
• Minimizes financial impact: By setting appropriate RTOs, businesses can minimize revenue loss, productivity decline, and customer dissatisfaction resulting from IT disruptions.

• Enhances trust: An effectively managed RTO ensures that services are restored quickly after an interruption, which helps maintain customer trust and satisfaction.

What’s the Difference Between RTO and RPO?  

Just like RTO, RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is an important metric used in disaster recovery. While RTO focuses on the duration of downtime, RPO focuses on the acceptable amount of data loss that an organization can tolerate after a disruption. 

To put it simply, RPO represents the point in time in which data must be recovered in order to resume normal operations after an incident.  

For example, if you experience a failure now and your last full data backup was 24 hours ago, your RPO is 24 hours. 

When considering RPO for a system or process, you need to think about data criticality, business requirements, regulatory obligations, and the organization’s tolerance for data loss. By defining an RPO, organizations can design appropriate backup, replication, and data recovery strategies to ensure that data is protected and can be restored within the acceptable recovery point. 

How Can a Company Set RTO and RPO Targets? 

Every company is different, so it’s important to approach your disaster relief plan from a holistic angle and think about the requirements to set your company up for success. That said, following these steps will get you started:

1. Identify and assess critical systems, processes, and data, considering the potential impact of downtime or data loss on each asset. Don’t forget to take into account dependencies.
2. Establish realistic RTO and RPO targets for each critical asset based on acceptable downtime, data loss tolerance, and cost.
3. Develop and implement a comprehensive incident response plan, including necessary backups, ransomware protection and file recovery.
4. Communicate with key stakeholders so they understand their  responsibilities and are aware of RTO and RPO expectations.
5. Periodically review and update RTO and RPO targets based on changes in business requirements, technology advancements, and risk assessments.

By following these steps, you can effectively set up and maintain appropriate RTO and RPO targets, ensuring better preparedness for potential disasters and minimizing the impact of downtime or data loss on your business operations.

Improve Your Recovery Strategy with ProLion

If one or more files need to be recovered, especially after a cybersecurity incident, it can be a real challenge to restore them. 

RestoreManager enables you to search for and restore the files you need in just a few clicks. It’s included as standard in our ransomware protection solution. 

Want to learn more about how ProLion helps with ransomware protection and data recovery? Watch the demo or get in touch with our team. 

This article was originally published in 2023 by Matt Elvers, former Technical Team Lead at ProLion and cybersecurity and storage expert. Excerpts may remain.