What's your maximum tolerable outage?

If the air conditioning breaks down in a hospital administration department in the height of summer, productivity starts to drop as the temperature rises. It becomes harder to stay focused on the task at hand, people get crabbier on the telephone with patients and suppliers and the “go the extra mile” motivation your organisation normally […]

Offsite Backup Tape Archiving for Disaster Recovery

If tape backup is an essential component of your disaster recovery strategy, then offsite tape archiving will often be as well. One of the classic tape backup risks is leaving the tapes onsite, where any disaster that wipes out your systems will do the same to your tapes. Basic disaster recovery strategy dictates that tapes […]

Business Continuity Terminology – What’s the difference between MTO, RTO and RPO?

A common query that we come across in business continuity consulting is, ‘what is the difference between MTO, RTO and RPO?’ MTO is the Maximum Tolerable Outage The Maximum Tolerable Outage for a critical business process represents the maximum amount of time that an organization can survive without the business process in any form (manual or automated). […]

Workarounds and the backlog effect

A workaround is an alternative process used to replace the normal ‘business-as-usual’ process or IT system which may be unavailable during business disruption. When determining the Maximum Tolerable Outage (MTO) for a business function, whether or not there are manual, paper-based workarounds is a factor that can help work out how long you can afford […]