Maximum tolerable outage or MTO is a common measure in both disaster recovery and business continuity. It is the maximum amount of time a system or resource can remain unavailable before its loss starts to have an unacceptable impact on the goals or the survival of an organisation. It’s either on or off, and if…
End of year deadlines and festivities mean that maximum tolerable outage is an increasingly hot topic in many sectors. But what will expectations be for the year to come? MTO in itself is a measurement, a tool to be used in delivering business continuity overall. Changes in MTO, whether in terms of level or application,…
Maximum tolerable outage means what it says – the longest time that an organisation can accept that a given service or facility is out of operation. Many enterprises and institutions go to great lengths to predict and calculate MTO, usually because of what’s at stake. Hospitals for example cannot accept IT outages that disrupt critical…
MTO and RTO are integral parts of disaster recovery planning, but they can also be used outside of that context. To recap on their definitions, MTO (Maximum Tolerable Outage) is the maximum amount of time that a process or facility can be unavailable before significant disruption and/or financial loss occurs to an organisation. RTO (Recovery…
A couple of interesting cases came up recently about differences in cloud backup services, and the effect that this might have on MTO and RTO. As a reminder, maximum tolerable outage (MTO) is the maximum time you or your organisation can afford to be without a given system or resource; recovery time objective (RTO) is…
To put a new twist on maximum tolerable outage, we’re talking about the length of time an organisation can afford to stop working, not in terms of making its products or providing its services, but on looking after its business continuity. Companies that have dedicated BC personnel may never have to answer the question. However,…
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),…
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…
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…
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…
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).…
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).…