Explanation of the most common business continuity terms

The pandemic has increased organizations’ interest in business continuity, as a way to protect themselves against disruption of their operations. However, in most cases, there is no time to wait for learning about business continuity processes, policies, procedures, and terms.

In this article, we offer help in understanding the difference between the most common business continuity terms, mainly based on the ISO 22301 glossary, the leading ISO standard for business continuity management.

Resume vs. recovery

Resume refers to having operations working again with a smaller capacity and in a different environment (e.g., operations resumed in the alternative site), while recovery refers to having operations back to normal conditions (i.e., main site is operational again). Restore, or restoration, is also a term that can be used instead of recovery.

MAO vs. RTO

Think about the maximum time your business can afford to be down after a disaster (e.g., minutes, hours, days, etc.) – this is the Maximum Acceptable Outage (MAO). Now, think about how fast after a disaster you want your business to resume operations – this is the Return Time Objective (RTO). In recent days, the term MTPD (Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption) is replacing the use of MAO (both terms have the same meaning).

The relationship between them is that RTO can be equal to or smaller than MAO, but never greater – an RTO greater than MAO does not make sense, because you would be resuming operations after the impact has become so big that doing business might lead to bankruptcy.

RTO vs. RPO

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the time after a disaster in which business operation(s) must be resumed. For example, if the RTO is 2 hours, then it means you want to resume delivery (Read more...)