RTO (Recovery Time Objective)

Recovery Time Objective, usually the abbreviation RTO is used. It is one of the indicators of data availability. RTO indicates the amount of time needed for data recovery and overall operation of an inaccessible system (software). It may be, depending on the technology used, expressed in seconds, hours or days.

Use of the RTO in practice: RTO indicator is from the customer’s perspective used to express the time for data recovery (e.g. through SLA). On the other hand, service providers can now choose from various backup technologies, respectively, data replication, and data recovery point decreases to zero loss. Existing technologies can be divided roughly as follows:

• Traditional backup - failure and restore lasts hours to days
• Asynchronous data replication - failure and restore lasts seconds to minutes, the loss approaches zero
• Synchronous data replication - zero loss

Related terms and methods:

• Asynchronous Data Replication
• Availability
• Backup
• Data
• Security and Protection of Information
• RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
• Synchronous Data Replication

Related standard:

• ISO 27001 Information security management systems

Related management field:

• Security Management