You are updating the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) for your company's data-center services. During stakeholder interviews, the operations director states, "If the inventory database is down for longer than 45 minutes, shipping stops and revenue losses begin." Which BIA metric should you document to capture this maximum acceptable outage window so that recovery efforts can be prioritized correctly?
The recovery time objective (RTO) expresses the maximum amount of time that a business function, system, or server can remain unavailable before the organization suffers unacceptable consequences. In the scenario, the director is specifying how long the inventory database can be offline-exactly what the RTO measures-so that engineers can design recovery strategies (e.g., clustering, standby equipment) to meet that target.
The recovery point objective (RPO) deals with how much data loss is tolerable, not the length of the outage. Mean time between failures (MTBF) is a reliability statistic used for hardware life-cycle planning and has no direct role in a BIA. An asset depreciation schedule is a financial accounting tool and is unrelated to continuity requirements. Therefore, only the RTO satisfies the director's request.
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What is the difference between RTO and RPO?
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How is MTBF different from RTO?
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Why is RTO critical in disaster recovery planning?