What is the measure of the amount of time a system can be offline during an outage called?

The term that describes the measure of the amount of time a system can be offline during an outage is known as the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RTO defines the maximum acceptable duration that a system, application, or service can be unavailable after a failure occurs before it starts to impact the organization’s operations significantly.

Establishing an RTO is crucial for developing effective disaster recovery and business continuity plans, as it helps organizations prioritize their recovery strategies and allocate resources effectively to minimize downtime. It focuses on how quickly the system should be restored to ensure continuity of business processes.

In contrast, the other terms mentioned do not accurately describe the duration of downtime associated with system failures. For instance, Response Time Objective typically relates to the speed at which a system can respond to a request or incident after a failure happens, rather than the time it can remain offline. Failure Time Objective and Recovery Planning Objective are not standard terms used in the context of downtime and recovery; therefore, they do not apply to the assessment of acceptable outage durations.