Recovery Time Objective: What It Is and How to Improve It

Elena Humeniuk

PPM Consultant

One of the main parameters in a disaster recovery strategy is a recovery time objective (RTO). It sets the maximum time your systems can be down before your business is negatively impacted.

Finding an appropriate RTO for each service helps determine whether you meet your service level agreements (SLAs) with your customers. It also tells you whether you can restore service within a reasonable period. Repeatedly breaching your recovery time objectives (RTOs) post incidents indicates that you need to pay more attention to your disaster preparedness.

In this article, you will find out what a recovery time objective (RTO) is, why RTOs are essential, how they help disaster recovery, and how to gradually improve your goals.

Recovery Time Objective Definition and Importance

A recovery time objective is when services must be restored to avoid significant negative consequences such as lost sales, reputational damage, and increased customer support requests. An RTO means a team must restore services before that disruption will badly impact the business.

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Recovery Point Objective vs. Recovery Time Objective

While RTO is concerned with downtime, recovery point objective (RPO) refers to how much data you can lose in an incident. For example, an RPO of one hour guarantees that a disaster will not result in the loss of data older than one hour. RPOs are possible based on robust data backup strategies that regularly schedule the replication of critical information. RTOs, on the other hand, use tools and processes that promote rapid detection, investigation, the recovery of systems, and the restoration of backed-up data.

Recovery RTO/RPO Relationship

RPO and RTO go together to define the operational resilience of a system. RPO minimizes data loss, while RTO minimizes downtime by ensuring services return to working within the permissible recovery window. These two things, combined, are the spine of disaster recovery planning.

Why RTOs Matter

RTOs are critical recovery team benchmarks in a disaster. They channel resolution efforts toward specific stakeholder goals. Furthermore, customers typically require that RTO demands be included with service level agreements (SLAs).

RTOs for Disaster Preparation vs. Cost Efficiency

To maintain low RTOs, you need to be well prepared, which includes spending on advanced tools, dedicated teams, and regular rehearsals of recovery processes. Readiness at this level frequently comes at a significant cost but recovers rapidly when incidents occur. Regular rehearsals and planning are needed to minimize the probability of unexpected disasters, layering even higher RTOs.

How to Determine a Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

It takes careful analysis of all your systems to determine an RTO. For effectiveness, RTOs must be realistic. Recovery time helps determine how rapidly systems can be returned online during a disaster compared to planned recovery time.

The process of determining an RTO can be summarized as follows:

• Determine which services are critical. High-priority services require RTOs to be lower so they can be restored faster.
• Establish your actual recovery time. See how fast you can use backups. If it’s not technically possible to recover from a worst-case scenario within the allocated time, then RTOs are meaningless.
• Attempt to improve your RTOs. You can establish a baseline figure and attempt to decrease your RTO by tweaking your disaster recovery tools and strategies.

RTO Setting and Optimization Process

To reflect the critical level of individual services, RTOs can be allocated for each.

Then, you must determine a feasible RTO. You should assess based on data, such as how long it took you to restore after the last incident. Rehearse your disaster recovery strategy and refine its value.

Most of the time, technical limitations prevent you from using a lower RTO. You wouldn’t set an RTO of one hour when you need two hours to take advantage of your backups. Test how quickly you can obtain critical data, review your backup regime, and ensure your RTO matches your findings.

Disaster Recovery and RTOs

RTOs are essential because they give you an unambiguous notification that things are starting to get out of control and are beginning to affect your business in unacceptable ways. You won’t know whether your disaster recovery strategy is working if you don’t have an RTO. An RTO is something you can measure against that shows whether you can deal quickly enough with services going down.

A cohesive disaster recovery plan is required to successfully respond within the RTO by getting services back online. Effective RTO disaster recovery planning minimizes downtime and restores critical systems within acceptable time limits. Solid strategies are formed from multiple elements with which your whole team is familiar:

• Offsite copies of data must be maintained. You need to back up your data to wherever will be outside of your primary systems. If you don’t do that, you may discover you cannot reach your backups where you need them.
• Do incident monitoring well. So that you are alerted when an incident starts, you need good observability of your apps and infrastructure. If you depend on manual monitoring, you will miss the start of an incident, eroding your RTO before you become aware of the problem.
• Plan for disasters. Rehearse how you’ll perform, and plan for disasters. This reduces the uncertainty and stress of the recovery procedure. It should be clear to everyone what the strategy is and how it will be achieved.

After you have defined the recovery process, you can define your RTO and look to see what you can improve on.

RTOs for Project Management and How to Improve It

Losing project management data can be a significant stress. Data loss, stalled projects, and decreased productivity can threaten your organization’s reputation, so it’s essential to be prepared for any unexpected scenario.

For project management systems with large volumes of data, very low RTOs, such as a few seconds or minutes, are usually unrealistic. If you are going to lose projects, you’ve got to know the time it is going to take for you to recover that data during an incident.

There are, however, ways to increase your RTOs without making them unattainable:

• Increase backup frequency. Backing up more often improves your RPO and also helps your RTOs. Using an incremental backup technology allows you to back up more frequently.
• Use incremental backups. If you suffer a catastrophe and lose all your project data, whether an incremental backup can be usable is debatable. Full backups remain a good idea to keep on standby as well.
• Synchronous mirroring should be implemented. A backup strategy using synchronous mirroring automatically copies data to a remote, secondary site when it’s written to the local, primary storage.
• Granular backup tools should be selected. Recovery of parts of your project data is possible through granular recovery options. The granularity can substantially speed up recovery in case of an incident caused by damage to a particular asset.

Conclusion

Recovery time objectives refer to how long you can be down with an incident before it must be resolved. When your business operations are interrupted, you have exceeded the RTO. If this happens, it will quickly be picked up by customers and could impact your organization negatively, whether financial, regulatory, or reputational.

Creating the perfect DR strategy that balances the recovery time objective and recovery point objective and minimizes downtime and data loss for a company is a significant challenge. A low RTO is no guarantee you’ll achieve it unless it’s part of a complete disaster recovery plan with the right support tools and procedures. Try to back up your applications using data protection platforms and then speed up their restoration. With such platforms, your critical data is available immediately, and you can restore it with a few clicks. This would allow you to make more significant promises to customers, and the efficiency can also allow you to reduce your RTOs.