Time! Most people don’t have enough of it. They wish they had more. There is never enough time. 

They wish they had lived in an earlier era or could turn back time and fix the errors of the past. People are obsessed with time and all its manifestations. 

And so it is with time for recovery. People want their data back now. They won’t stand for any delays. They often specify a recovery time objective (RTO) of zero. Easy enough to specify but expensive to achieve. 

See below for some of the top trends in recovery time objectives: 

1. Immutability and isolation 

Ransomware has turned the entire world or IT on its head. Backup and recovery are no exception. 

As backups are easy to infect, those wishing to recover data quickly need to take malware into account. 

“To meet RTO demands, customers need to consider isolated recovery environments or immutable solutions that can protect backup copies from ransomware attacks,” said George Crump, chief product strategist, StorONE. 

“The ever-present ransomware threat forces IT to rethink how they meet recovery point and recovery time objectives.”  

2. Near-zero RTOs 

The overwhelming trend is for people to demand ever smaller RTOs. 

If they can recover in days, they want it in a few hours. If they can make it in an hour, they want to take it down to a few minutes. 

“Organizations are increasingly willing to spend more to shorten their recovery times,” said Vasilii Zorin, senior project manager, Acronis. 

“Companies need speedy recovery in case of disasters, as they heavily rely on IT systems to facilitate effective work of distributed teams in a hybrid environment. Organizations cannot tolerate hours or days of downtime. They should be able to restore operations in a matter of minutes.” 

3. Zero RTOs

Recovery technology has matured enough, costs have come down enough, and business needs require a zero RTO without compromise, according to Jason Lohrey, CEO, Arcitecta. 

Easier said than done. Lohrey laid out an all-too-common scenario for what typically happens when an end user needs to recover data in an enterprise environment. 

First, they need to submit a request to the IT department to recover lost data….