15. Exercise: RTO

QUESTION:

When determining what type of RTO you can support, there are many factors to take into consideration. By not accounting for components that impact your RTO, you put your ability to meet the obligation at risk.

Let's consider the situation where a database runs out of disk space in the middle of the night. Some of the items to consider are:

• Problem happens
• An amount of time passes before an alert triggers
• Alert triggers on-all staff
• On-call staff may need to get out of bed, get to a computer, log in, log onto VPN
• On-call staff starts diagnosing the issue
• Root cause is discovered
• Remediation started
• Issue fixed

Estimate how much time each of the above is likely to take. Use that data to create a timeline of the incident. What is the RTO of this incident?