FAQ
Business continuity and disaster recovery questions
What is the difference between MTD, RTO, and WRT?
MTD (Maximum Tolerable Downtime) is the longest an organization can survive without critical systems. RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the time target to restore systems, and WRT (Work Recovery Time) is the time to verify data and process backlogged work. MTD must be greater than or equal to RTO + WRT.
What is Recovery Point Objective (RPO)?
RPO is the maximum acceptable age of files or transactions that can be lost when an outage occurs. For example, an RPO of 1 hour means you must back up data frequently enough that you lose no more than 1 hour of transaction data.
How do you calculate the financial cost of an outage?
Total Outage Cost = Direct Lost Revenue + Idle Employee Payroll + Emergency Incident Remediation Fees + SLA Customer Credits + Downstream Reputation/Churn Drag.
What happens if RTO + WRT exceeds MTD?
A resilience deficit occurs. The organization cannot recover operational integrity before catastrophic, irreversible financial, regulatory, or operational damage takes place.
Why is idle labor cost included in downtime calculations?
When core systems, machinery, or networks fail, salaried and hourly workers are blocked from performing productive work, representing pure unrecoverable overhead expense.
Can I export the business continuity audit to CSV?
Yes. You can export complete MTD, RTO, RPO, resilience headroom buffer, and multi-component outage cost metrics as a UTF-8 CSV spreadsheet with formula injection defense.