ITPEC FE Subject A April 2025 Question 44
Which of the following should be accomplished in service management concerning Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD), Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and Recovery Time Objective (RTO)?
Explanation
RTO < MTD — the target recovery time must end before the outage becomes intolerable for the business.
The three continuity measures answer different questions:
- •MTD (maximum tolerable downtime): how long the business can survive without the service before the damage is unacceptable
- •RTO (recovery time objective): how long after the failure the service must be running again
- •RPO (recovery point objective): how far back in time restored data may reach, that is, how much data loss is acceptable
MTD and RTO are both lengths of outage, so they can be compared: if the planned recovery took longer than the business can tolerate, the plan would fail its purpose. RTO must therefore be set shorter than MTD. RPO measures data loss, not downtime, so no ordering against MTD is required.
Answer (d)
Why not others:
- •(b) MTD < RTO — the reverse: recovery would finish only after the business has already suffered intolerable damage
- •(a) MTD < RPO and (c) RPO < MTD — RPO is a data-loss window looking back from the failure, while MTD is an outage length looking forward, so neither ordering is a requirement
Key rule: MTD is set by the business impact analysis and caps the RTO; RPO is chosen separately and drives how often data is backed up or replicated.
Service Management · AI-written, may contain errors
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