RTO (Recovery time objective, “target recovery time”) is the period during which the system may remain unavailable in the event of an accident or malfunction. In other words, it is the minimum time for the system to be restored to working condition from any incident level. “System” refers to an application, computer, server, network, etc. The key criterion for calculating RTO is the cost of system downtime.
Information security audit
The RTO can range from a few seconds — for example, when replicating in the cloud, to several days when the backup is written to physical media — for example, to magnetic tape. The choice remains with the customer: if this is the bank’s client portal, the downtime should not exceed several minutes, if a personal website, it can “lie down” for a day.
To ensure a minimum RTO, several Hi-End solutions are usually combined. In the cloud, for example, these are VMware vShpere and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager software products in combination with the NetApp data storage system. At the same time, the RTO can range from 15 minutes to restore 100 machines to one and a half hours to restore 500 machines in one Protected Group.