Recovery time objective (RTO)
The target maximum time to restore a service after disruption.
In practice
In SaaS DR planning, RTO is the maximum acceptable downtime for a tier-1 service — for example, four hours for the customer API but twenty-four hours for internal analytics. Engineering encodes RTO in runbooks, backup restore tests, and incident severity definitions.
Common confusion
RTO is a recovery target, not the actual outage duration or acceptable data loss.