What is RTO and why it matters for businesses
- RTO – Recovery Time Objective is the maximum acceptable time a business process, service, or system can be unavailable before it must be restored.
- If a critical function stops (e.g., invoicing, production, or an IT system), the RTO sets how quickly it must be recovered to prevent unacceptable financial, operational, or customer impact.
Examples of RTO for common business processes
- Invoicing – RTO 24 hours (after a day, cash flow and billing may be disrupted).
- Customer support – RTO 4 hours (tickets and complaints stack up and customer trust drops fast).
- Document archive – RTO 7 days (short outages are usually manageable for stored records).
Typical RTO ranges
- 0–4 hours (mission-critical)
- up to 24 hours
- up to 72 hours
- up to 7 days
In short: RTO is the maximum acceptable downtime for a process before serious business impact occurs.