The recovery time objective (RTO) is the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.
In accepted business continuity planning methodology, the RTO is established during the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) by the owner of a process, including identifying options time frames for alternate or manual workarounds.
In a good deal of the literature on this subject, RTO is spoken of as a complement of Recovery Point Objective (RPO), with the two metrics describing the limits of acceptable or “tolerable” ITSC performance in terms of time lost (RTO) from normal business process functioning, and in terms of data lost or not backed up during that period of time (RPO) respectively