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Business Continuity

Recovery Time Objective

RTO

Maximum acceptable time to restore a service or system after a disruption.

Full Definition

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines the maximum duration a business can tolerate a service being unavailable after an incident. RTO drives infrastructure decisions: a 15-minute RTO requires hot-standby failover; a 4-hour RTO may allow warm standby. In data centre contexts, RTO influences redundancy design, automation of failover, and the need for multiple geographically distributed facilities.

Also Known As

recovery time objective

Source Reference

ISO 22301 — Business Continuity Management Systems

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