[Term of the Day]: Recovery Time Objective
Term of the Day
“Recovery Time Objective”
Definition — What is RTO and why is it important?
RTO, the acronym of Recovery Time Objective represents the maximum acceptable amount of time for restoring an unexpected failure or disaster and not result in significant damage to a business and regaining access to data after an unplanned disruption.
It comprises of the following components: Starting from the point of disaster, the time before a disaster is declared, the time to perform tasks (as documented in the BC or DR plan) to the point of business resumption whereby the data which was lost, up to the point of disaster, is restored.
The amount of time for RTOs can greatly vary depending on the nature of the business and the process or system involved. For example, the RTO for a payroll system might be as long as two weeks, while the RTO for a sensitive financial process might be effectively zero, requiring that service be restored almost instantly.
Why Recovery Time is important
The time it takes to get operations back to normal is a core component of business continuity disaster recovery, and one of the key factors that separate it from traditional backups.
With a traditional, data-only backup solution, the time to recovery can be days. How much does a business lose when it doesn’t have access to its data or primary computing resources for several days?
The answer will vary based on the nature of the business—larger companies typically hemorrhage money faster during an outage.
According to statistics from a CA Technology survey cited by Informationweek.com: “small enterprises lost, on average, more than $55,000 in revenue due to IT failures each year, while midsize companies lost more than $91,000 and large companies lost more than $1,000,000. A data center outage by itself can cost more than $5,600 per minute.”