Understanding the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for Critical System Outages

An organization suffered an outage, and a critical system took 90 minutes to come back online.

Though there was no data loss during the outage, the expectation was that the critical system would be available again within 60 minutes.

Which of the following is the 60-minute expectation an example of?

A.

MTBF

B.

RPO

C.

MTTR

D.

RTO.

D.

The 60-minute expectation in this scenario is an example of RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

RTO is a metric used in disaster recovery planning that defines the maximum amount of time an organization can tolerate for a system or service to be unavailable before it starts to impact business operations. In this case, the organization expected the critical system to be back online within 60 minutes, but it took 90 minutes, which means that the RTO was not met.

MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) refers to the average amount of time a system or component operates before it fails. It is a measure of the system's reliability.

RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is a metric that defines the maximum amount of data loss that an organization can tolerate in the event of a disaster or outage. For example, if an organization has an RPO of 1 hour, it means that it can tolerate losing up to 1 hour's worth of data.

MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) refers to the average amount of time it takes to repair a failed system or component. It is a measure of the system's maintainability.

In summary, RTO is the correct answer because it specifically refers to the time it takes for a system to be recovered after an outage, which is the situation described in the question.