Maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPOD) is the maximum amount of time that an enterprise's key products or services can be unavailable or undeliverable after an event that causes disruption to operations, before its stakeholders perceive unacceptable consequences.

Definition

The BSI Group

BSI Group

BSI Group, also known in its home market as the British Standards Institution , is a multinational business services provider whose principal activity is the production of standards and the supply of standards-related services.- History :...

 standard BS 25999

BS 25999

BS 25999 is BSI's standard in the field of Business Continuity Management . This standard replaces PAS 56, a Publicly Available Specification, published in 2003 on the same subject.-Structure:...

 requires the dependencies of critical activities to be identified (other activities, assets, resources, suppliers and outsource partners).

BS 25999-2, 20 Nov. 2007 Section 4 says that the goal of a Business Impact Analysis BIA is to "determine the impact of any disruption of the activities that support the organization's key products and services."

A key aspect of determining the impact of a disruption is identifying what BS 25999 calls the "maximum tolerable period of disruption" (MTPOD). BS 25999 defines MTPOD as the "duration after which an organization's viability will be irrevocably threatened if product and service delivery cannot be resumed." MTPOD is just a useful metric that determines how much unavailability an organization can stand before everything crashes and burns and can't be put back together again.

The MTPOD is also known as "maximum acceptable outage" and "maximum allowable outage", in both cases the corresponding acronym is MAO.

See also

• Business Continuity Institute
  Business Continuity Institute
  The Business Continuity Institute was established in 1994 to enable individual members to obtain guidance and support from fellow business continuity practitioners...
  
  
• Business continuity planning
  Business continuity planning
  Business continuity planning “identifies [an] organization's exposure to internal and external threats and synthesizes hard and soft assets to provide effective prevention and recovery for the organization, whilst maintaining competitive advantage and value system integrity”. It is also called...
  
  
• Business continuity
  Business continuity
  Business continuity is the activity performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. These activities include many daily chores such as project management,...
  
  
• Disaster recovery
  Disaster recovery
  Disaster recovery is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity...
  
  
• Emergency management
  Emergency management
  Emergency management is the generic name of an interdisciplinary field dealing with the strategic organizational management processes used to protect critical assets of an organization from hazard risks that can cause events like disasters or catastrophes and to ensure the continuance of the...
  
  
• Natural disaster
  Natural disaster
  A natural disaster is the effect of a natural hazard . It leads to financial, environmental or human losses...
  
  
• Risk management
  Risk management
  Risk management is the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities...
  
  
• Disaster recovery and business continuity auditing
  Disaster recovery and business continuity auditing
  Disaster recovery and business continuity refers to an organization’s ability to recover from a disaster and/or unexpected event and resume or continue operations. Organizations should have a plan in place that outlines how this will be accomplished...
  
  
• Resilience (organizational)
  Resilience (organizational)
  Resilience is defined as “the positive ability of a system or company to adapt itself to the consequences of a catastrophic failure caused by power outage, a fire, a bomb or similar” event....
  
  

Further reading

• BS 25999-1:2006 Business Continuity Management Part 1 - BSI Group
  BSI Group
  BSI Group, also known in its home market as the British Standards Institution , is a multinational business services provider whose principal activity is the production of standards and the supply of standards-related services.- History :...
  
   British Standards Institution
• BS 25999-2:2007 Business Continuity Management Part 2 - BSI Group
  BSI Group
  BSI Group, also known in its home market as the British Standards Institution , is a multinational business services provider whose principal activity is the production of standards and the supply of standards-related services.- History :...
  
  British Standards Institution

External links

• Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPOD)
• Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPOD): BSI committee response
• http://www.bccmanagement.com/mtpod.html
• http://e-janco.com/MaximumTolerablePeriodofDisruption%20.html