Glossary Terms
What is a recovery time objective?
In a data loss situation, the recovery time objective determines how quickly the business expects to return to normal operation. For example, an RTO of an hour means that everything must be back to normal in an hour. When there is data loss, the company must recover its data back to its original state within an hour to meet the objective. This helps determine what kind of backups to invest in.
Why do I want to set a recovery time objective?
Setting a recovery time objective helps you to build your disaster recovery plan and lets you know what tolerances you are willing to establish. It is foundational to developing a backup plan because your recovery time objective can only be met if you are able to recover your data in time. This will determine what kind of backups you do and what kind of system you invest in, because recovering very large backups very quickly might not be feasible depending on your objectives.
How to determine recovery time objective
Calculating your Recovery Time Objective is a straightforward evaluation that can lay the groundwork towards more robust data resilience.
- Identify Essential Systems & Data:
Pinpoint the systems pivotal to your organization like cloud data, email, databases, digital and financial tools, or any other files that may be stored on employees’ endpoint devices. - Set Maximum Downtime Limits:
Establish the longest duration each crucial system can be offline or data being inaccessible without causing substantial harm to your business’ operations. - Compute the Recovery Time Objective:
RTO signifies the maximum recovery duration after a disruption. Your RTO can be deduced for each system by simply subtracting the allowed downtime from the disruption’s onset time.
What’s the difference between a recovery time objective and a recovery point objective?
Recovery point objective determines how quickly you must recover from a data loss event. For example, an RPO of an hour means that data must be backed up every hour to meet the objective. When there is data loss, it must at most cause the company to lose an hour’s worth of data and no more than that amount.
Whereas a recovery time objective does not take into account how much data loss you will tolerate, but how fast you are determined to recover. You might set a recovery time objective of a day and recover from full backups of very large datasets, which would be infeasible to recover in the span of a few hours.
Best Practices for defining a recovery time objective
- Determine the needs of your business: To set a recovery time objective you must take into account your backup systems and the size of your data set. You have to purchase the right capabilities and come up with a plan.
- Be realistic: Setting an unrealistic target might lead you to over complicate your situation. Give yourself room and don’t spend past your needs.
Talk to your vendors: Your disaster recovery plan should be part of your conversations with vendors when you research capabilities.
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Related Glossaries
CrashPlan® provides peace of mind through secure, scalable, and straightforward endpoint data backup. We help organizations recover from any worst-case scenario, whether it is a disaster, simple human error, a stolen laptop, ransomware or an as-of-yet undiscovered calamity.
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