Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable downtime for a system — how quickly it must be running again after an outage starts. A four-hour RTO for email might allow manual restore from backup; a 30-minute RTO for line-of-business apps may require high availability clusters or warm standby in Azure. RTO drives staffing for nights and weekends during incidents. Publish RTOs internally so support teams prioritize correctly during a crisis. MSP contracts often map severity levels to RTO targets; verify they match your business reality.
