Recovery Time Objective

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of downtime that elapses following a disaster. It is the amount of time before the application is back online and processing new transactions. RTO can be 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 occurs at 2:00 p.m. If RTO is 1 hour, the application will be back online and ready by 3:00 p.m. to process transactions.