IT disaster recovery time objectives (RTOs) are the maximum acceptable time that an IT system can be unavailable after a disaster before it causes unacceptable consequences for the business. IT RTOs should be based on the business-defined criticality of the systems, which reflects how important they are for supporting the business processes and functions. The maximum tolerable loss of data, the nature of the outage, and the maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) are also factors that affect the IT RTOs, but they are not the primary basis for determining them.