5.2 Business Impact Analysis

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

When recovering from an outage, one of the statistics that managers want most of all is how long is it going to be before we get back up and running.

• A time frame that defines how long it is before we can get up and running.

• Your organization may not consider you up and running until both the database server and the web server are operational.

• The time frame it takes to get both of those systems running would be the objective.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

How much data loss is acceptable?

• Bring the system back online; how far back does data go?

• For example, we may only consider ourselves operational if we have at least the last 12 months of data available

• If we have to reload data from our backups, we know that we have to get at least 12 months of data in the database before we can say that we are now up and running.

Mean Time To Repair (MTTR)

Describes the average amount of time it takes to resolve a problem that may have occurred.

• Includes time spent diagnosing the problem

• Often a value that we can change based on what resources we might have available (you might purchase additional equipment to have on site, so if an outage occurs, you can simply pull that new equipment out of inventory)

Mean time between failures (MTBF)

Estimated time that the system will run before there is another outage.

• Used for planning purposes to know how risky it might be to use that particular piece of equipment.

• Provided by the manufacturer as a prediction based on the type of equipment that you’re using

• May be based on the historical performance of that equipment over time.

• Can perform a rough calculation by taking the total uptime for that equipment and dividing it by the total number of breakdowns.