Business Continuity For Dummies

Gathering Together What You Need

For each of your critical activities, you need to consider and select a continuity and recovery strategy. By that, however, we don’t necessarily mean that you have to identify an action for each one, because in some instances you may decide to do nothing because that’s the only option your business can afford. After all, the business and the consequences of the decisions that you make are yours.

To identify and select your strategy options, your mission – if you decide to accept it – is to ensure that your selected responses are within the maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPD) and within the maximum tolerable data loss (MTDL). To accomplish this aim, we use the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), which provide a guiding light when you’re discerning the options that work from ones that don’t.

For explanations of the terms MTPD, RTO, MTDL and RPO, check out Chapter 1.

You get the best out of this chapter when you’ve:

Identified your business’s key products and services (check out Chapter 4).

Worked out the critical activities required to keep these products and services running (also in Chapter 4).

Gained an understanding ...