13. Recovery Time Objective

Recover Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum time your platform or service can be unavailable. If your platform is offline from noon until 5:00pm and you have a 4 hour RTO, then you have failed to maintain your RTO.

When setting an RTO, be sure to consider the many items that go into meeting an RTO. What are the things that you will need to have in place to achieve your RTO? If your RTO is less than 72 hours, you will need to have folks available on the weekend to fix your system. If it is less than 8 hours, you will need people available in the middle of the night. Not only will you need people available at these off-hour times, but they will need to have a wide range of knowledge on your systems, access to the systems, and the trust of the company to make critical changes on their own.