Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the time is the amount of time it should take for systems to come back online when an outage occurs. Data centers strive to keep RTOs as low as possible to meet their Service Level Agreements with their internal and external end users. The faster the system comes back online, the better.
RTOs usually vary with the technology that is being used for DR:
Clustering solutions – failover happens over the course of seconds or virtually instantaneously
High Availability solutions – failover happens over the course of seconds / minutes
Cloud-based DRaaS – failover occurs over the course of minutes
Tape / Image – manual restoration occurs over the course of hours / days
Consider DRaaS using Cloud infrastructure. Instead of backing up to a static image, you will instead be backing up into a Cloud image. The big difference being that Cloud images are “bootable”, ready to take over workload when production servers are down and decreasing recovery times significantly.