Is that Maximum Tolerable Outage, Maximum Tolerable Disruption, or What?

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 […]

Maximum Tolerable Outage(s) for the Supply Chain in 2013

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 by Whose Criteria?

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 […]

Maximum Tolerable Outage is Also Defined by User Frustration Levels

In the days when business continuity was still mostly a competitive advantage, there was a tendency to think of maximum tolerable outage as being defined by external customer expectations. Whether for manufacturing, finance or other industry sectors, MTO was measured in terms of effect on the customer base, likely customer reactions and the impact on […]

Maximum Tolerable Outage of Your BC Team

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, […]

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), […]