A Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is a metric used to measure how fast you can recover your IT infrastructure and services following an incident or outage (business continuity). RTO is calculated based upon how long your business can survive before operations must be restored to normal. If your RTO is twenty-four hours, it means you’ve determined that the business can maintain operations for that amount of time without having its normal data and infrastructure available. If data and infrastructure are not recovered within twenty-four hours, the business may face irreparable harm. Many IT strategies can be used to reduce both RTO and RPO through redundancy, planning, and strategy.
Source: MSP360
Additional Reading: RPO and RTO – What do I need to Know?
Related Terms: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan, Restore (Recovery)
What should SMB Owners do?
- CyberHoot recommends strong data backup processes following the rule of three (3) for backups:
- Have at least three (3) copies of your data.
- Store the copies on at least two (2) different media types.
- Keep at least one (1) of those copies offsite.
- Have a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan in place.
- Test your disaster recovery plan and see if there are any gaps that need to be filled.