RTO

How it works

• It is the time from failure to working again.
• A short RTO needs spare hardware or cloud recovery ready in advance.
• Ordering replacement hardware alone can take days.

What can go wrong (example scenario)

A five-person dental office assumed their backup meant a quick recovery. When the server died, the restore to a new machine took three days, including ordering hardware. Three days of appointments were cancelled.

How WILDCARD handles it

Unified Backups keeps cloud and computer backups so a restore is possible. Matching the restore method to the RTO the business actually needs is part of recovery planning, which vCIO covers.

• A dental office needs the schedule and charts back within hours or the day is lost.
• A law firm can run on email alone for a day while the document system restores.
• A retailer needs the point-of-sale back in an hour and can wait a day for the back-office PC.

Example scenario: A small veterinary clinic's server failed on a Monday morning. Their RTO was two hours, so the backup was built to boot the server image as a temporary virtual machine. Reception was taking appointments again within ninety minutes while the replacement hardware was ordered.

A question owners ask

How do I know what my RTO really is?

Time a real restore. Until you have done that once, your RTO is a guess, and the guess is usually optimistic.