Operations, maintenance and contracts
RTO
Abbreviation for Recovery Time Objective
In short and in plain language
The RTO is the time in which a system should run again after an outage.
It is a target, not a promise.
Maintenance contracts often list it next to the data loss that is accepted.
Definition
The RTO is the time within which a system should be running again after an outage. It is a target value and not an assurance. In maintenance contracts it is often considered together with the RPO, the tolerated data loss.