CMP 630 Business Impact Analysis

Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD).

The MTD represents the total amount of time leaders/managers are willing to accept for a mission/business process outage or disruption and includes all impact considerations. Determining MTD is important because it could leave continuity planners with imprecise direction on

(1) selection of an appropriate recovery method, and

(2) the depth of detail which will be required when developing recovery procedures, including their scope and content.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

The time available to recover disrupted systems and resources. It is typically one segment of the MTD. For example, if a critical business process has a three-day MTD, the RTO might be one day (Day 1). This is the time you will have to get systems back up and running. The remaining two days will be used for work recovery (see Work Recovery Time).

Work Recovery Time (WRT)

The second segment that comprises the maximum tolerable downtime (MTD). If your MTD is three days, Day 1 might be your RTO and Days 2 to 3 might be your WRT. It takes time to get critical business functions back up and running once the systems (hardware, software, and configuration) are restored. This is an area that some planners overlook, especially from IT. If the systems are back up and running, they're all set from an IT perspective. From a business function perspective, there are additional steps that must be undertaken before it's back to business. These are critical steps and that time must be built into the MTD. Otherwise, you'll miss your MTD requirements and potentially put your entire business at risk.

Remember this formula:  MTD = RTO + WRT.  So in my example of above 72hrs = 48hrs + 24hrs

Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

The RPO represents the point in time, prior to a disruption or system outage, to which mission/business process data must be recovered (given the most recent backup copy of the data) after an outage.

Data in Italics is for demonstration purposes and should be replaced when you create your own table.