
In some cases, RTO for print servers can be as high as 24 hours.ĭefining RTO is a critical component of a DRP, as the goal of disaster recovery is to have a strategy in place that helps the business recover and restore normal business operations. These losses will likely be significantly less than those incurred during a financial services outage or even when email is disrupted.
#Significant architecture lost to time Offline#
Having a printer go offline or be unavailable is an inconvenience that might result in financial losses. Email outages don't always directly correlate to lost revenue, as is the case when financial services go down. While email is a critical service for many, it can have an RTO of up to four hours for recovery. These are among the most critical services where RTO is as close to zero as possible (while RTOs in other areas can reach as high as several hours). For example, mission-critical applications will have lower RTO, while less critical services will often have a higher RTO, as the duration of time for an outage - and the associated loss tolerance - will be higher. Measure recovery time objectives in seconds, minutes, hours or days.īased on the BIA for an application or service outage, the objective set for a recovery time objective can be variable. Defining the loss tolerance involves how much operational time an organization can afford (or is willing) to lose after an incident before normal business operations must resume. Keep in mind, however, there can be different RTO requirements based on application priority as determined by the value the application brings to the organization.Ĭalculating RTO requires determining how quickly the recovery process for a given application, service, system or data needs to happen after a major incident based on the loss tolerance the organization has for that application, service, system or data as part of its BIA. The value of the application can also be linked to any existing service-level agreements, which define how available a service needs to be and may include penalties if those service levels are not met.īy understanding what is running and what the value is of all the running systems and applications, it becomes possible to calculate RTO. That value should be determined based on duration of time and at as granular a level as possible. Without an accurate inventory, there is no way to accurately determine an RTO.Īfter completing the inventory, the next step is to evaluate the value of each service and business-critical application in terms of how much it contributes how a company operates and conducts business. The first step in the RTO process is to completely inventory all systems, business-critical applications, virtual environments and data.


The key goal of an RTO is to determine what duration of time it will take in a recovery process after a major incident to resume normal business operations. These studies indicate the cost depends on long-term and intangible effects, as well as immediate, short-term or tangible factors.Ĭalculating recovery time objective is a multistep process that needs to be considered from several different viewpoints, including business impact analysis ( BIA), DR strategy and business continuity planning. Numerous studies have been conducted in an attempt to determine the cost of downtime for various applications in enterprise operations. If the RTO is five days, then tape or off-site cloud storage may be more practical. For example, if the RTO for a given application is one hour, redundant data backup on external drives may be the best solution. Once an organization has defined the RTO for an application, administrators can decide which disaster recovery ( DR) technologies are best suited to the situation. It is an important consideration in a disaster recovery plan ( DRP). These factors, in turn, depend on the affected equipment and application(s).Īn RTO is measured in seconds, minutes, hours or days. The RTO is a function of the extent to which the interruption disrupts normal operations and the amount of revenue lost per unit time because of the disaster. The recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum tolerable length of time that a computer, system, network or application can be down after a failure or disaster occurs.
