Recovery Time Objective

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of downtime that elapses following a disaster before the application is back online and processing new transactions. RTO refers to the point in time in the future at which you will be up and running again. An RTO is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, or days.

In most disaster-tolerant designs, RTO is secondary to the amount of data loss that can be tolerated.

For example, a disaster hits at 2:00 pm. If the RTO is 1 hour, your expectation is that the application will be back online and ready to process transactions by 3:00 pm.