Recovery Time Objective (RTO) Explained

Are you a business looking for ways to reduce downtime and ensure the quick recovery ability of your IT infrastructure? One key concept you should become familiar with is recovery time objective, or RTO.

It's an important element in any comprehensive disaster recovery plan because it helps keep your entire operation running smoothly for business continuity if something disrupts it temporarily.

In this blog post, we'll explain you what exactly an RTO is, how to calculate it and provide examples of different scenarios.

Let’s dive in!

What is a Recovery Time Objective?

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of time a system, application or process can be down without causing significant harm to the normal business operations.

RTO is often used in conjunction with Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to help businesses determine how often they should schedule data backups.

For example, if an RTO of 24 hours is established for a particular system, then the system must be restored within that period. Failure to restore the system in time could have disastrous consequences for the normal business operations.

As per ISO 22301, RTO is defined as the maximum allowable time that a business can tolerate for the recovery of its critical activities after an incident.

RTOs can vary depending on the application, system, or organisation. During the process of business continuity planning, RTO timelines are determined through Business Impact Analysis (BIA).

In addition, this analysis helps assess the potential impact on the business and enables effective decision-making for timely disaster recovery and business continuity plan implementation.

The recovery process timeframes can range from seconds to hours or even days.

An important objective of a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is to assess the time required to restore and resume normal business operations after a major incident.

However, it is important to note that the shorter the RTO, the more expensive the disaster recovery plan.

By identifying their RTO, business units can define their disaster recovery processes, including data backup and restore, data protection, and allocate resources accordingly to ensure business continuity.

Recovery Time Objective Examples

Here are the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) examples for different scenarios:

• Financial services: As close to zero as possible
• Email: Up to 4 hours
• E-commerce: Up to 12 hours
• Healthcare: Up to 24 hours
• Manufacturing: Up to 48 hours
• Education: Up to 72 hours

How do you calculate RTO?

Here are 6 steps to calculating recovery time objective:

Step 1: Identify the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) 

The first step in calculating Recovery Time Objectives is to identify your Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The RPO is the maximum length of data loss that you are willing to lose in the event of a natural disaster or system downtime.

For example, if your RPO is set at one hour, then you should be able to recover any critical data that was lost within the last hour.

Step 2: Calculate the Backup Window 

The next step in calculating RTO is to calculate your data backup window. This is the amount of time it takes for all of your data backup to be stored securely offsite.

It includes both full data backups and incremental backups, as well as any time needed for validation and verification processes.

Step 3: Estimate Data Restoration Time

Once you have calculated your backup window, you can estimate how long it will take to restore all of your lost data in the event of a disaster or system failure.

This time can vary depending on the type of data being restored, as well as the number of servers and databases that need to be restored.

Step 4: Calculate Data Processing Time

In addition to estimating data restoration time, you should also calculate how much time it will take for any necessary processing and analysis tasks once the data has been restored.

This includes tasks such as validating new records or running reports against newly restored databases.

Step 5: Estimate Testing Time

Once all of your data has been restored and processed, it's important to test that everything has been successfully recovered before going live with new systems or applications.

Depending on the complexity of your environment, this testing process could take anywhere from several hours to several days or even weeks.

Step 6: Determine Your RTO

Finally, once you have estimated all of these times together, you can determine what your overall RTO should be for any given disaster or system failure scenario of your business-critical application.

Your RTO should include enough buffer time so that there is no risk of losing any critical customer or business information due to an unexpected delay in recovery efforts.

Recovery Time Objective Best Practices

Here are some of the best practices of RTO:

1. Establish an RTO

The first step in setting up a Recovery Time Objective is to establish an RTO for each critical system or process that needs to be protected.

An RTO is the maximum amount of time that it takes to recover a system or process after a data loss, or an incident has occurred.

The goal of an RTO is to ensure that the system or process can be recovered and returned to normal operations as quickly as possible.

2. Identify Critical Systems and Processes

Once the RTO has been established, it is important to identify which systems and processes are critical to the organisation’s operations.

These should be identified based on their importance to the organisation’s success and their potential impact on customers, employees, and senior management if they were unavailable for any length of time.

3. Develop a Plan

After identifying the critical systems and processes, it is important to develop a disaster recovery planning for how they will be recovered in the event of any disaster occurs.

This plan should include details such as which personnel are responsible for recovery efforts, what resources will be needed, and how long it will take to complete recovery activities.

4. Test the Plan

Once a plan has been developed, it should be tested regularly to ensure that it is effective and efficient enough to meet the organisation’s RTO goals.

Testing should involve simulating different types of incidents and evaluating how well the plan works in those scenarios.

This testing should also include measuring how long it takes for recovery activities to be completed under different circumstances so that any areas where improvement is needed can be identified and addressed accordingly.

5. Monitor Performance

It is also important to monitor performance over time in order to ensure that recovery efforts remain effective and efficient enough to meet the organisation’s RTO goals.

This monitoring should involve tracking metrics such as average recovery times, number of successful recoveries, etc., so that any areas where performance could be improved can be identified and addressed accordingly.

6. Update Your Plan as Needed

Finally, it is important to update the plan as needed in order keep up with changes in technology or business operations over time so that recovery objectives and efforts remain effective and efficient enough for meeting organisational objectives related to RTOs.

Recovery Time Objective vs. Recovery Point Objective

The main difference between RTO and RPO is that RTO is the amount of time it takes to recover after a disaster strikes, while RPO refers to the amount of data loss your business can tolerate without causing severe damage.

In other words, RTO defines the maximum acceptable downtime for an application or service, while RPO sets the maximum acceptable data loss that can occur.