What is a Recovery Time Objective (RTO)?

Continuity is a critical component of a holistic cyber-resilience strategy that layers on tools and solutions to cover as many bases as possible, especially during an era of remote work. To identify the most appropriate business continuity solution, it’s important for businesses to establish their
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to understand to what extent downtime and data loss affects their business operations. In this blog post, we will explain what a RTO is, why it's important and why your business needs a managed backup solution.

A RTO is the maximum amount of time that your business can tolerate being without access to its critical systems and data before facing consequences (such as lost sales, angry customers, frustrated employees, etc.). Depending on your industry, compliance considerations and data storage, your RTO could be minutes, hours or days. It’s an important part of your disaster recovery plan and can help you minimize the impact of an outage on your business’ operations.

There are many reasons why your business may experience downtime. Here’s are some of the most common causes:   

• Cyber attack 
• Natural disaster 
• Power outage 
• Human error 
• Hardware or software failure

As of 2023, the average cost of a data breach in Canada was 5.13 M USD. - IBM  

The first step in setting an RTO is to define it. Defining the potential loss involves how much operational time an organization can afford (or is willing) to lose after an incident before normal business operations must resume. What business critical operations, can you not afford to lose for more than hour? These often include banking transactions, client records, CRM systems.  

Once an RTO has been defined, the best technologies can be selected to prevent a disaster from happening in the first place or to minimize the impact. Without an effective Managed Backup solution and Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan, it could take days or weeks to get back up and running after an incident, resulting in:  

• Financial loss 
• Reputational damage
• Lost productivity 
• Legal action
• Data loss

Managed Backup

The Nucleus Managed Backup Solution is a backup and disaster recovery platform that backs your data up locally for high-availability and in the case of a disaster, ensures that you can rapidly recover with minimal disruption to your business operations with off-site backups at Nucleus’ Disaster Recovery Data Center (DRDC) in Toronto.   

Among the 18% of businesses that were impacted by a cybersecurity incident in 2021, about 40% experienced an average downtime of 36 hours. -Statistics Canada 

Our enhanced disaster recovery solution works by capturing images of your critical servers that are continuously updated. This allows us to quickly restore your servers in the event of a localized disaster and it provides the potential for your key employees to access critical data and services shortly after a major disaster occurs by connecting to our remote data centre. 

Key Features: 

• Reliability 
• Scalability 
• Secure end-to-end encryption 
• High-availability and minimal downtime 
• Transparent reporting of backup health 
• Tied into ticketing and alerts 

Is your Business Backing up your Microsoft data?

Cloud providers do not backup your data: your business data is your own responsibility. Microsoft holds replicas of your data, but no backups or point in time recovery. All businesses today require email backup, but this alone may not be enough as the regulatory landscape evolves requiring some sectors to invest in email archiving to ensure compliance for business-critical data.

Our team of vCIOs can help your organization develop a disaster recovery plan, establish your RTO and keep your organization secure. Reach out to us to schedule a meeting to learn more.