Why Your Business Needs Recovery Time Objective to Survive

Sometimes things go wrong. Despite all the planning in the world, things can, and will, go wrong.

The key is to prepare for failure. That means predicting disaster and planning ahead for “what will happen when it strikes?”. But your best-laid strategies and failover mechanisms during an outage may be all for naught if you don't know how long your systems will be down or which applications are most critical for continuous business operations.

Recovery time objectives (RTOs) are an essential step in defining your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan. RTOs require you to carefully analyze your applications and their relative importance to your business.

Choosing disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) software enables businesses to implement a simple yet powerful solution with a low RTO to minimize critical data loss and financial impact.

RTO is an important metric for how quickly and efficiently you can recover information in the event of a disaster. Knowing how much time your data needs to survive can help you lay down an efficient backup strategy and overall IT hardware purchasing plan.

To ensure an appropriate RTO, IT departments use failover to prevent downtime and facilitate a smooth transition between systems. When a disaster strikes, your business should be prepared for rapid recovery. Moreover, your IT team needs to develop contingency plans to know what applications to recover and how quickly.

IT teams also ensure applications have a reliable backup ready to minimize downtime. This way, other servers can take over and have your application running within seconds in the event of a disaster.

You can measure RTOs in seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Keep these units in mind while developing a disaster recovery plan (DRP).

To facilitate effective DRP, admins can pick the disaster recovery (DR) solutions best suited for a set RTO. For example, if an application's RTO is one hour, redundant database backup on remote systems could be the ideal solution. Tape or off-site cloud storage is more feasible if the RTO is five days.

Why is recovery time objective important?

Downtime is costly. Forty-four percent of businesses report that the hourly cost of downtime, including internal and external IT staff time, lost productivity, and replacing the IT system easily tops $1M. With so much depending on your IT infrastructure and uptime, recovery time objectives make sure companies are well-prepared for downtime and recovery.

RTOs enable you to plan how quickly you can recover a critical application if it fails. RTOs are typically measured in seconds. If an application isn’t unavailable for five seconds, paying developers to restore data on the fly doesn't make sense. Instead, priority applications should have failover systems that begin the restoration process before they become inoperative.

In the unlikely event of extended server downtime or prolonged data corruption event, you wouldn’t want the expensive recovery efforts to be wasted trying to recover data before exhausting all available backups. RTOs let organizations prioritize their investments and allocate budgets accordingly.

To determine a practical RTO framework, separate the high-priority applications. Start by setting up a process that determines your organization’s risk of loss.

You can establish appropriate RTOs with a risk assessment process that identifies the value-added and critical components of your operation. The high-priority applications usually deal with customer accounts, customer service, and mission-critical applications, such as manufacturing or logistics operations that rely heavily on technology.

How does recovery time objective work?

Recovery time objectives ascertain how long a company can last after a setback before fully recovering. For example, a corporate business had an RTO of 24 hours some years ago. In that case, it can thrive for at least 24 hours without access to its typical data and systems before suffering irreversible damage.

RTOs are not strict as they don’t specify a recovery date. They allow you to focus more on getting closer to a specific potential via rigorous planning and evaluation ​​than on the ultimate goal.

Many factors influence recovery times, including the time of day and week when the incident occurred. They also impact both RTOs and recovery point objectives (RPOs). High-priority applications demand stricter objectives. For such applications, the IT team needs to arrange continuous and snapshot replication.

RTO sample intervals

RTO is a time of endurance after a threat is detected. Most IT businesses cannot afford to achieve a near-zero RTO. However, they can optimize applications and services to get as close as possible to a specific goal. For less critical apps, the RTO value may require longer periods than typical. Near-zero RTO plans for mission-critical apps need instant failover ability.

Depending on the severity of the disruption, you can set a realistic RTO goal for data recovery. However, the restoration time also depends on the limitations of a company. For example, if restoring all IT services and processes takes three hours, the RTO must be at least three hours.

Recovery time objective examples

Depending on the business impact analysis (BIA), the recovery time objective for an application or service outage can be slightly different. Mission-critical applications, for example, often have a lower RTO. In contrast, less critical services have a more extensive RTO, as the duration of an outage and the related loss tolerance is greater.

Here are some examples of RTOs:

• Financial services: These are high-priority services, with RTO as close to zero as possible.
• Email: While email is an essential service for many, recovery time can take up to 4 hours. Email outages don't always directly equate to lost revenue.
• Printer services: It's inconvenient and sometimes costly when a printer is down or unusable. These losses are much lower than those incurred during a financial services outage or even an email outage. RTO for print servers can reach 24 hours in extreme circumstances.

Factors influencing recovery time objective

When determining the pace of recovery during a long interval backup, you should always set RTO based on the times when the application or security system is in service. As RTO is "time-sensitive" for commonly used applications, you must account for the following factors while calculating RTO:

• Cost-benefit analysis for recovery systems
• Outage and remediation costs
• Recovery process challenges
• IT teams' efforts to repair the infrastructure
• Priority use of specific systems and data

RTO in disaster recovery planning

Disaster recovery is a clear plan that helps a company recover and resume regular business operations. This makes defining RTO vital for a business continuity plan (BCP). With a recovery time objective as the main goal, a business can realign its data backup and failover strategies and deploy the appropriate amount of new services. This guarantees target recovery speed.

Without an RTO, a business has no idea how quickly it should recover from a severe threat or data loss. Disaster recovery planning is about being equipped for unforeseen outages. To be prepared, you need a clue or plan for estimating recovery time.

Businesses should establish a solid business continuity plan with predefined goals as part of the disaster recovery planning process. These goals should include the RTO and RPO to guarantee an expected recovery rate.

RTO vs. RPO

While both recovery time objective and recovery point objective are essential components of disaster recovery and business continuity planning, they serve different purposes. These purposes can help select a suitable data backup strategy and provide a framework for identifying and evaluating potential solutions to resume business operations in a timeframe near or equal to the RPO and RTO.

Recovery time objective refers to having policies and technology in situ for a business to recoup in a given time. In comparison, recovery point objective ensures that the data recovery and backup solutions are in place ahead of time to minimize the amount of data lost during an emergency.

RTO and RPO work together to restore a company's regular activities. They determine the business impact by considering the time it takes to restore services and an organization’s maximum loss tolerance.

How to calculate recovery time objective

Calculating recovery objectives is a multi-stage process that involves various factors, including business impact analysis, disaster recovery strategy, and continuity plans. The primary aim of an RTO is to evaluate how long it takes to rebound from a severe disaster and restore normal business operations.

When calculating RTO, remember that you’ll have unique RTOs for each service or app. For example, your tolerance for downtime on your mail server should be significantly less than on a rarely used file server. Consider these factors so that your disaster recovery strategy is as efficient and successful as possible.

The first step in calculating an RTO is to thoroughly assess all systems, mission-critical applications, virtual environments, and data silos. There is no way to correctly establish an RTO without a comprehensive audit.

After completing the assessment, the next task is to calculate the quality of each service and mission-critical app in terms of how they impact the business processes. This value should be calculated granularly and time-related. The app's value can be tied to any current service-level agreements (SLAs) that define how accessible a service must be and may include repercussions if certain service levels are not met.

You can estimate RTO by evaluating the value of all functioning services and apps. However, keep in mind that RTO requirements can vary based on a service’s importance measured by the value it provides to the company.

Calculating RTO involves determining how quickly the process for a particular program, service, system, or data should resume after a significant incident. This is based on the business's loss tolerance as part of its BIA. Defining loss tolerance helps establish how much uptime a company can afford to lose during an event before regular business operations resume.

Also, involve all your company stakeholders in the process. While the financial impact of downtime is likely to be at the top of your priority list, it's critical to understand how downtime will affect every aspect of your business before developing a plan that works for everyone.

RTO challenges

It's often not feasible for a company to immediately resume all operations following a setback. RTO is the anticipated point at which a business needs to restore its functions to prevent any goal-related complications. RTOs differ for different operations. One crucial process could have a staggered RTO to enable operations to resume progressively. For example, an activity might be at 40% capacity in three days and 100% in eight days.

One of the most complex challenges in setting RTOs is the possibility of unanticipated threats or crises disrupting the workflows. These risks include the collapse of a facility, disruptions in a processing area, connectivity failures due to natural disasters, and a shortage of processing employees due to strikes or transportation issues.

These one-off circumstances that adversely affect processes exist outside of set RTOs. This is because the time required to resolve them cannot be estimated or planned. In such instances, avoiding risks is preferable to set up an RTO.

For example, a business with excellent security processes can avert numerous security breaches. The overall crime rate in their region and the specifics of the company influence security.

Don’t let downtime destroy your success

It's critical to establish your RTO and RPO and set up the services that support them. However, these metrics are meaningless unless you regularly test your systems and ensure that data backup and system failover technologies are operational. Regular testing is the key to success.

Plan for disasters before they happen. Take your disaster recovery to the next level with DRaaS.