Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Understanding the Key to Efficient Recovery

With the increased reliability on online resources, the threats of data theft have also increased. Cyber-attacks, ransomware, corrupted servers or a hard drive malfunction can remove all your data within seconds. Additionally, you can experience natural disasters, like earthquakes, tornados and much more, that can lead to similar havoc in your business. The worst part is that if you are not well-prepared for such disasters, you will be left clueless about what to do!

Now, these disasters are unavoidable, especially natural disasters, over which you have no control. However, your IT team have the potential to failover them and recover all your data eliminating the chances of any loss in the business. They can establish a recovery time objective based on your budget and priority, and you can rest assured that nothing can cause a poor impact on your business. Let us define the recovery time objective and discuss how it can help businesses.

What is the recovery time objective? Give Examples

RTO is the maximum time for which an application or a system can be down, without resulting in any significant damage. It is the total duration from the moment a disaster happens until the IT department sets things right by recovering the data and bringing the system back to normal. The diagram below explains what RTO is in pictorial representation.

If your IT department already has a strategy in mind, you can expect the RTO recovery time objective to be just a few seconds. That is why companies hire proficient experts with ITIL certification to handle their disaster recovery department. These people work towards finding the potential threats to the company data and have a disaster management plan ready for effective implementation.

Examples of RTO

There are several examples of recovery time objectives for different businesses. Some of them are listed below.

Example 1: A healthcare company that operates multiple hospitals and individual clinics has lots of patient records. Additionally, they have appointment schedules and different kinds of data, which is crucial for them. To ensure that they recover from any expected outrage within the desired timeframe, they can maintain redundant servers or perform regular backups to keep the critical data backed up.

Example 2: Another recovery time objective example is an E-commerce company seeking help from disaster recovery services. E-commerce platforms depend a lot on their websites or applications for sale. Anything going wrong with their online platforms will affect their entire business. Thus, they have to keep an RTO strategy ready to successfully recover the data on time and keep their operations smoother and seamless.

Significance of RTO in Business Continuity

No matter how hard you try, there are always chances of a significant disaster affecting your business. Especially the natural calamities over which you have no control can affect the software and hardware components of your business, bringing things to a standstill. The downtime of hours can cause a lot of monetary loss, so there has to be some way in which you ensure the minimum possible halt. That is where keeping the high recovery time objective standards can help!

Your IT department should always have a plan of action ready to cope with any kind of disaster. They should perform regular backups or have redundant software to help them recover faster. This way, they can keep the recovery time within the speculated limit and ensure almost zero company loss. On the other hand, if there is no strategy and no team to take care of this aspect, expect to experience a significant loss which may even lead to the closing of the business with huge loss.

Factors Affecting RTO Determination

Now you know that determining the recovery time objective is crucial for an organization. As you start determining the same, you will find various factors that can affect the recovery time objective calculation. Some of these factors are:

1. Infrastructure Complexity

If your IT infrastructure is utterly complex, it will take more time to recover and restore it after a disaster. Thus, the complexity of an IT infrastructure is directly proportional to the time taken for recovery. The more complex the system is, the more its RTO.

2. Data Volume

Recovery is all about data restoration. So, it goes without saying that the amount of data you wish to recover directly impacts the RTO. You have to keep a higher recovery time expectation if you have huge volumes of data to recover.

3. Type of Disaster

Sometimes, disasters are not that significant in nature, so their impact is not adverse. For example, the RTO will be significantly low for a power outage, but a disaster affecting the primary data center would take a lot of time for successful recovery.

4. Budget

Budget is also a significant factor affecting the recovery time after a disaster. If the company can spend more money and resources, they can obviously have better, faster and more efficient recovery options.

5. Recovery Strategy

Another factor affecting the RTO and RPO, recovery point objective is the strategy chosen by the team. If the company have a well-designed recovery plan, which they have tested before, it won't take much time to bring things back to normal.

These are the few factors that directly impact the RTO determination. Even when you do the IT service management courses, your trainers will teach you about these factors and ways to determine the time considering these factors.

Types of RTO Testing  

Recovery time objective assessment is crucial for any organization. The primary objective is to attain near—zero downtime after getting affected by a disaster. This process involves the restoration of all the IT operations and is complicated in many ways. You would have to consider the prioritizations set by the IT department and might have to automate the process as much as possible for faster results. Different types of strategies that can work with RTO testing are:

• Segregate the data and processes based on their priorities. This way, you will sort the most crucial operations first and then the easier ones.
• Streamline some recovery processes by simply automating the tasks to the best possible level. If the backups keep automatically performing, the recovery will be faster.
• It is an expensive process because near-zero downtime is only possible with lots of investment in virtual environments. So, keep the company budget in mind before investing in data replication setups.

Relationship between RTO and Business Impact Analysis (BIA)  

RTO is the time the systems will take to recover and bounce back to normal after being hit by a disaster. It is an overall time period from the moment a disaster affects the systems till the time everything comes back to normal. The significant thing to note here is that RTO comes into the picture after the disaster has occurred.

BIA, business impact analysis, is the work done prior to a disaster affecting the systems. It is the process of identifying the potential risks involved in a business and the level to which they can have an impact. BIA is a crucial component of the business continuity plan. It involves an exploratory component to uncover the risks to the system to overcome the vulnerabilities and develop strategies to minimize the risk.

Challenges and Mitigation Strategies for RTO  

A company might face a lot of challenges while framing its RTO strategy. Especially for a complex IT infrastructure, there are multiple add-on challenges that make things complicated for the RTO teams. Some of the issues that they might face are:

• Dependency of the applications on one another. In most IT companies, there is an interdependency of the applications and systems. Only when one system works smoothly can the other give results. Thus, even if one system is in a working state, it would be useless until the unit it depends on is working fine.
• If the applications get recovered in an incorrect order, the team will have to perform the entire recovery process over again.
• Another challenge the team might face is bringing every device or software application back to the recovery point objective and starting the operation as usual.

These are only a few of the plethora's of challenges that a company faces. That is the reason it is crucial to hire proficient experts who’ve successfully completed KnowledgeHut’s ITIL Certification or any other renowned course to rest assured that they have got everything covered.

RTO vs Recovery Point Objective (RPO)  

Recovery time objective and Recovery point objective are the metrics that companies should consider while developing their data recovery plans. The table below shows a fair comparison between the two to understand them better.

Parameters	RTO	RPO
Definition	It is the time taken to recover the systems after a disaster erupts.	It is the amount of data that an organization losses in an event of a disaster.
Primary Focus	Time Taken	Data Lost
Calculation	Simply subtract the maximum acceptable downtime from the time of a disaster disruption.	Calculate the maximum allowable date loss. Usually you can measure it in terms or number of transactions.
Relatability	RTO relates to how fast the organization recovers from the outage.	RPO relates to the amount of data that an organization can lose in case of a disaster disruption.

RTO Considerations in Technology Environments  

In the technological environments, there is always a threat of being hit by cyber intruders. Moreover, with more reliability on the cloud and other online sources, this threat of being attached through the web has significantly increased. So, every IT company, or those relying on technology, should consider the shortest recovery time objective. Some of the RTO considerations for such environments are:

• Having an idea about the potential disasters or troubles that can impact the system and lead to downtime.
• Keeping RTO strategies in place to ensure that the downtime stays within the stipulated limits and there is negligible data loss.
• Hiring the most efficient specialists for BIA and RTO strategy formation. It is always in the hands of your IT team to keep things working smoothly.

These are the simple RTO considerations that one should keep in the technology environment to keep the company from experiencing losses due to disaster outages.

Conclusion  

In the end, it is fair to say that while disasters are inevitable sometimes, recovery policies can help eliminate the consequences. So, it is crucial for every business to have an efficient IT team on board who knows RTO in and out. These people can identify all the potential disasters a business can get hit by and design strategies to keep the downtime to a minimum possible. Once the company has an RTO strategy in place, there is no need to fear cyber-attacks or any other disaster hitting your systems.