What does Recovery Time Objective (RTO) primarily define in disaster recovery planning?

Question

Options

• AThe maximum tolerable length of time that a service can be offline
• BThe total duration for which data might be lost due to an incident
• CThe geographical distance between primary and backup sites
• DThe amount of time it takes to detect a system outage

• A
  76% (13)
• B
  6% (1)
• C
  6% (1)
• D
  12% (2)

Explanation

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines the maximum acceptable downtime for a system or service - in other words, how long the business can tolerate being offline before the impact becomes unacceptable, making option A correct.

Option B describes Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which measures data loss tolerance in time (e.g., "we can afford to lose up to 4 hours of data"). Option C (geographic distance between sites) is an infrastructure design concern unrelated to time objectives. Option D (time to detect an outage) relates to Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), a separate operational metric.

Memory tip: Think of RTO as the deadline for recovery - "How long until we must be back up?" and RPO as the data freshness deadline - "How old can our backup data be?" RTO = Time to get back Online.

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