Disaster Recovery Journal

on the scope of the outage and the availability of recovery teams and hardware, but could require from several hours up to several days or more.

Reflections

Returning to the title’s question, of course the answer is “no” in a definitional sense. RTO and MAD are different concepts which address different requirements, although their numeric values may be similar in many cases.

As has been shown, the maximum allowable downtime and the recovery time objective for highly resilient capabilities can, and often will differ considerably. An inverse relationship can develop as resilience increases. A short duration MAD can “peacefully coexist” with a long duration RTO, because the RTO applies only to one the production site (at a time), not to the capability as a whole.

The business requirements which forge a maximum allowable downtime typically have little flexibility. Unlike RTO, MAD and can be determined subjectively, without regard to feasibility. As the DRJ’s “Generally Accepted Practice” document states, “A BIA tool [or process] should never force an RTO.” The next four paragraphs augment the argument to avoid mandated RTO values.

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Recovery time objective’s flexibility to increase in duration grows as its capability’s resilience level increases. In the highest segment of the resilience spectrum, the need for RTO could disappear altogether. At that level of resilience, there is less need to maintain a separate recovery environment for a single site outage. The affected instance can be rebuilt on the original production site. RTO is not applicable, as RTO describes activity which occurs in a recovery environment. This restoration duration could be better described as a rebuild time objective.

Like other aspects of organizations, RTOs should be “ right-sized.” Urgency often correlates to expense, particularly if a vendor is supplying the recovery product or service. Where high resilience provides some breathing room in reducing the urgency of RTO without increasing risk, organizations should accept the cost savings of that approach.

A RTO should not be arbitrarily long. If the feasibility is the same between shorter and longer RTO options, the selected RTO should be the shorter one. In the commotion of a disaster, it is easier to delay a group’s recovery than it is to hasten it.

Recovery time objective cannot be unrealistically short for business functions. People must relocate and regain access to their supporting technology or equipment, which may need to be re-installed, replaced or rebuilt.

If organizations prioritize their capabilities, alignment by maximum allowable downtime will always produce a logical order of importance. Indeed, it is the only approach if the organization possesses highly resilient capabilities. The varying relationship between RTO and MAD at different resilience levels makes RTO an unreliable measure. Prioritization based on recovery time objective when an organization possesses highly resilient capabilities, will yield a skewed, and perhaps inverted, criticality list.

Capability resilience level is an equally unreliable basis for prioritization, particularly for highly dispersed functions which may not be critical to the organization. However, CRL can help clarify priority between capabilities which have equal MAD values. Higher priority (of recovery) should be assigned to capabilities with lower resilience levels.

RTO (by itself) is not a meaningful statistic to disclose to outside parties, as its significance is made clear only in the context of MAD and CRL. CRL is a more valuable measure to disclose, if an organization wishes to publicize the resilience of its capabilities. CRL has the added benefit of not directly disclosing priority. CRL could become a competitive advantage when its customers truly value availability.

Recovery time objectives can resemble maximum allowable downtimes, and often closely align to them in less resilient situations. For highly resilient capabilities, RTO and MAD values should diverge. Capability resilience levels rationalize the relationship between RTO and MAD.

v

Frank Lady ( bcjfrank@gmail.com) is a senior vice president of business continuity at Bank of America. Lady is a past member of the DRJ Editorial Advisory Board, and serves periodically as an associate faculty member at the University of Phoenix’s Sperling School of Business. The author appreciates and has incorporated suggested refinements from these colleagues: