RTO, or Recovery Time Objective, is the maximum amount of time that a service or system can be unavailable after a failure or disaster before the business impact becomes unacceptable. It answers the question: "How quickly do we need to get this back online?"
RTO is a key parameter in business continuity and disaster recovery planning. Different systems within an organization typically have different RTOs based on their criticality. A payment processing system might have an RTO of minutes, while a reporting dashboard might have an RTO of hours.
Achieving your RTO requires having the right infrastructure, processes, and monitoring in place. Fast detection (monitoring), quick notification (alerting and escalation), documented procedures (runbooks), and tested recovery mechanisms (backups, failover) all contribute to meeting RTO targets. Hyperping's monitoring detects outages within seconds, which is the first step toward meeting any RTO.