A financial institution is implementing a high availability (HA) solution for its critical applications to ensure minimal downtime and data loss. The institution has two data centers located in different geographical regions, each equipped with identical hardware and software configurations. They plan to use a synchronous replication strategy to keep the data consistent across both sites. If the primary site experiences a failure, the failover to the secondary site should occur seamlessly. Given that the average time to detect a failure is 5 seconds, and the time to switch to the backup system is estimated at 10 seconds, what is the maximum potential downtime for the institution\'s critical applications during a failover event?