How long can you be down?
Recovery time objective (RTO) is your target maximum time to restore a business service after an interruption. Set it around the service people need, including login, network access, and dependencies—not just the time to start a virtual machine.
How much work can you lose?
Recovery point objective (RPO) describes the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time. A 15-minute RPO means planning to recover data to a point no more than 15 minutes before the incident. It is an objective to validate, not an automatic guarantee.
Set objectives application by application.
A payment system and an internal archive rarely need the same plan. Identify a business owner, the impact of downtime, dependencies, and tolerable data loss for each service. Then test the entire recovery workflow against those objectives.
Put downtime into perspective
This illustrative calculation helps you frame a conversation. It does not estimate provider pricing or every business impact.
Illustrative impact = hourly impact × downtime hours.
A useful question for every provider
Further reading: Microsoft’s Site Recovery reliability guidance ↗. Its platform RTO definition illustrates why a VM-level commitment needs careful interpretation.