Abbreviations for business continuity
When things go wrong, how long does it take you to be back on track? Is there a plan in place This is what business continuity planning, disaster recovery and, in some sense, even incident response are all about. Let’s learn a few abbreviations in this area. These are all part of the Security+ material (surprise!), but I think they represent interesting questions to ask as anyone responsible for the reliability or security of a production system.
| Abbreviation | Description |
|---|---|
| RTO - Recovery Time Objective | The recovery time objective defines the maximum tolerable time it can take to restore a system after an outage. |
| RPO - Recovery Point Objective | A recovery point objective defines how much data loss is acceptable, by setting a point in time. |
| MTBF - Mean time between failures | This is a measurement of a systems reliability, usually in hours. It’s defined as the average time between failures. |
| MTTR - Mean time to repair | The mean time to repair refers to how long it takes, on average, to restore a system after a failure. |
Re-phrasing all this as questions to ask about our resilience we get:
- How long can we survive without this system? (RTO)
- How often do we need to run backups? (RPO)
- How often does this system go down? (MTBF)
- How long does it take us to fix it? (MTTR)
I hope you have at least discussed these, so that when a disaster happens, recovery can be as smooth as possible.