Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)
What is Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)?
Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)The average time required to restore affected systems and services to normal operation after a security incident or outage.
MTTR (recover) tracks the full restoration phase: rebuilding compromised systems, recovering data from backups, validating integrity, re-enabling user access and confirming business operations are healthy. Unlike containment, it focuses on returning to a steady-state production posture rather than merely stopping the attacker. It is closely tied to RTO and RPO and depends heavily on backup quality, disaster-recovery design, automation, runbook completeness and supplier responsiveness. Tracking MTTR per incident class and per critical service highlights where infrastructure brittleness or dependency on manual work prevents the organization from meeting agreed recovery objectives.
● Examples
- 01
Driving MTTR for a critical billing service down to under 2 hours through immutable backups and tested DR runbooks.
- 02
Reporting MTTR by service tier as an input to executive risk reviews.
● Frequently asked questions
What is Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)?
The average time required to restore affected systems and services to normal operation after a security incident or outage. It belongs to the Defense & Operations category of cybersecurity.
What does Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) mean?
The average time required to restore affected systems and services to normal operation after a security incident or outage.
How do you defend against Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)?
Defences for Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.
What are other names for Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)?
Common alternative names include: Recovery time, Time to recover.