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RTO (Recovery Time Objective)

RTO defines the maximum acceptable time to restore systems after a disaster or outage.

What is RTO?

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable length of time that a system can be down after a failure or disaster occurs before unacceptable business impact.

RTO examples

RTO of 4 hours means systems must be restored within 4 hours of outage.

Common misconceptions

  • "RTO is recovery completion" — Time to start recovery matters
  • "Lower RTO is always better" — Cost/benefit tradeoff
  • "RTO and RPO are equal" — Often different values