What is a Recovery Time Objective (RTO)?

Owned by Tahir Kulelija
Last updated: 03 Dec 2020

A Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the amount of time it takes from the moment you initiate your disaster recovery (DR) failover to when you are able to use the VMs in the new SecondSite? environment.

A lower RTO is better because it will typically mean that disruption to operations are minimised, users can get back to work quicker and your websites are back online faster.  Low RTOs means less chance of your customers or other external parties even realising you were down for any period of time.

SecondSite? stands out by offering incredibly low RTOs.

RTO examples

5-10 minute RTO

This is the default RTO you will receive when using SecondSite?. It means every VM comes online at the same time after a disaster event.

20-30 minute RTO

If you have selected to power some VMs up only after other VMs have successfully powered up, then you can expect an RTO of around 20-30 minutes.

>30 minute RTO

It is possible to inject scripts or wait times within SecondSite? that can do pretty much anything in your environment. If you add in some scripts or commands which take a long time to process or complete, then your RTO can be greater than 30 minutes.