Once the service interruption is detected, the RTO is the time from that point until the service is restored to its regular service level. For example, an RDS database is marked as failed (DB Instance Status) as it has a hardware failure and cannot be recovered as a part of the service. The system admin is subscribed to the RDS event SNS topic, and he/she receives a failure event (RDS-EVENT-0031) via email.

Suppose that the business has stated that the time objective for this database is one hour. From that point, the system admin has one hour to restore the service operation, according to the Organization Level Agreement (OLA).