What is RTO and why it matters for businesses
- RTO – Recovery Time Objective is the maximum acceptable time to restore a system outage, interrupted process, or other incident.
- If a critical function stops (e.g., production halts), the RTO defines how quickly it must be restored to avoid unacceptable impact. Recovery time is part of the total downtime (MDT – Mean Downtime).
- For critical systems where any downtime is unacceptable, RTO = 0, meaning an immediate, seamless failover to a backup solution (high availability).
Examples of recovery times for common business processes or services
- Power outage – RTO, for example, switch to backup power within 2 minutes (without electricity, almost nothing works)
- Manufacturing execution system (MES) recovery – RTO within 10 minutes
- Accounting system recovery – RTO 4 hours (restore from backup)
- Document archive – RTO 7 days (short outages are acceptable).
Sample RTO scale
- 0–4 hours (immediately critical)
- up to 24 hours
- up to 72 hours
- up to 7 days
In short: RTO = the time by which you must be able to restore a system or operation.