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 patient monitoring systems, and stockbrokers can perhaps only tolerate outages of a few minutes. However, and as astonishing as that may seem, some entities involving groups of thousands of people don’t appear to take MTO into account when hit by natural disasters.
Posts Tagged ‘natural disaster’
Maximum Tolerable Outage by Whose Criteria?
Monday, November 12th, 2012A government disaster recovery plan with long term visions
Monday, September 10th, 2012How far would you expect a disaster recovery plan to extend into the aftermath of a disaster? Days? Weeks? Months? Years…? The Queensland Natural Disasters Jobs and Skills Package from the state of the same name in Australia shows how government perspectives on a situation can be different to individual enterprises, especially in terms of the timeframes involved. It is often said that where commercial companies plan ahead in terms of years, governments do it in terms of decades. The large number of people often involved in regional or even national populations explains the need to allow for significantly longer periods in which to effect a change or resolve a problem.
Does a Business Case for Business Continuity Change after Disaster?
Friday, April 13th, 2012It’s been a year since the natural earthquake and tsunami disasters struck Japan, wrecking many high-tech factories on the country’s north-eastern coast. The Sony Sendai Technology Centre was one of those factories and suffered like the others. Managers and employees struggled to save what they could to restart operations as rapidly as possible. Sony top executives applauded the courage and the determination of the factory staff, as did the local community. Now, 12 months later, cutbacks are reducing factory headcount significantly. Does that invalidate the original business case for business continuity or the extent of the recovery efforts?