Enterprises are currently facing a "perfect storm" of escalating service disruptions and lengthening recovery times. According to Cutover’s IT disaster recovery survey, 73% of organizations have experienced an increase in cloud architecture outages over the last 12 months, and 75% believe that these outages take longer to fully recover from now compared to 12 months ago. In this blog, we’ll review recovery time objectives (RTOs), the impact of outdated disaster recovery plans on RTOs, and how scalable IT disaster recovery solutions help you achieve low RTOs.
What is RTO in IT disaster recovery?
First, let’s define RTO, or recovery time objective. An RTO is your target response time after a disaster. It’s a key metric and essential part of an IT disaster recovery plan that defines the maximum acceptable amount of downtime for critical business functions.
Why recovery times for disaster recovery are increasing
Despite the increasing frequency, disaster recovery times are lengthening. A significant 77% of organizations report that recovering from a cyber attack is slower now than it was just a year ago. This gap is largely driven by a lack of proactive planning:
- Stagnant Planning: Only 20% of enterprises are constantly reviewing and updating their disaster recovery (DR) plans.
- Outdated Procedures: 31% of organizations have not updated their DR plans in more than 12 months.
- Barriers to Updates: The main reason for this inaction is the complexity of updates (31%), followed by resource constraints and staff availability (16%).
How enterprises measure success in meeting RTOs
While an RTO is the key metric, for some enterprises it’s not the whole picture in measuring recovery time success. The survey included an open-ended question about how organizations are currently defining and measuring success when it comes to meeting their RTOs. Here are the responses:
- Tracking recovery times during tests and real events to ensure timely restoration against predefined RTO targets and industry means.
- 100% uptime of all mission critical applications and system availability post-recovery to maintain consistency.
- Measuring quantitative and qualitative data points such as employee engagement, satisfaction, and productivity levels.
- Conducting post-incident reviews and full scale exercises to identify improvements and ensure the success rate of tests.
- Analyzing business impact and ROI through customer feedback, turnover rates, and regulatory audit compliance.
Bridging the RTO performance gap
The survey findings also highlight a troubling "reality check" regarding RTOs. While 50% of organizations aim for an RTO of one hour or less for their most critical systems, many are falling short of their targets.
- Low Success Rates: The mean success rate for meeting predefined RTOs for mission-critical applications is just 64%.
- Performance Breakdown: Only 17% of organizations report a success rate of 91% or higher. Conversely, 30% of organizations have a success rate of 50% or lower.
- Cloud Complexity: Transitioning resilience to the cloud remains a major hurdle. 48% of organizations struggle to adapt their disaster recovery plans from on-premise environments to the cloud.
How scalable disaster recovery solutions help achieve low RTOs
To combat the "perfect storm" of rising cloud outages and stagnant recovery procedures, enterprises are increasingly turning to scalable disaster recovery solutions to bridge the resilience gap. Cutover Recover helps bridge this gap by replacing static, manual documentation with automated, AI-powered runbooks that orchestrate tasks across teams and technology.
This shift from manual to automated processes has been shown to reduce execution time by as much as 50%, enabling organizations to meet even the most aggressive RTO targets. By standardizing procedures and reducing human dependency, these solutions provide:
- Standardized Recovery with Automated Runbooks: Utilize predefined, application-specific runbook templates to ensure a consistent recovery approach across complex on-premises and cloud environments.
- Precision Through Automation: Reduce human error and accelerate failover by automating repetitive technical tasks and orchestrating them alongside human decision-making.
- Real-Time Progress Visibility: Leverage live dashboards to monitor the status of recovery work across all workstreams, providing stakeholders with immediate insights during an incident.
- Measuring Success with RTA Comparison: Automatically capture the Recovery Time Actual (RTA), the true duration of restoration, and compare it against predefined RTOs to identify performance gaps.
- Simplified Compliance Reporting: Generate immutable audit trails and post-event reports automatically, reducing the time required for regulatory documentation from hours to minutes.
Ready to learn more? Book a demo of Cutover Recovery today.