Maximum Tolerable Outage Alphabet Soup
Specialist subjects are notorious for their abundance of acronyms and BCM with its “maximum tolerable outage” or MTO for systems is no exception. How many members of the MTO family are there? At the last count there were seven, although families often grow, especially when you’re not looking. Here’s the list: Maximum Acceptable Downtime (MAD), […]
MTO, RTO… How about MTD (Maximum Tolerable Degradation)?
We’re sometimes all too easily impressed by a few acronyms, like MTO, RTO and others in business continuity. It’s easy enough to find out what they mean, either from this site or elsewhere, but the real issue is whether that’s the point. Let’s explain. MTO stands for maximum tolerable outage, and RTO is for recovery […]
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 […]