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What is MTD and why is it important to businesses
The maximum tolerable downtime or Maximum Tolerable Downtime is the amount of time a business can exist without any work. It is the maximum number of hours or days that a business’s operations can be disrupted even if it does not cause an issue for customers. There are certain industries whose window for MTD is 24 hours like healthcare and banking, but some do have more generous windows like 72 hours in financial services. MTD enables businesses to run, smoothly and efficiently; schedule downtime is inevitable and MTD is a way in which an organization can reduce the effect of that downtime.
The concept of MTD was originally introduced by the U.S. Air Force in the early 1960s to reduce its vulnerability to Soviet nuclear attacks. However, many industries realize that MTD is also crucial to their survival and growth, especially in certain industries such as financial services and information technology (IT).
Laboratory tests, as well as practical experience, have shown that MTD is a useful way to measure the efficiency of an organization. Earlier this year, for example, the University of California—Berkeley’s Research Center for Information Technology proved that a system with an MTD of 72 hours is three times more likely to fail than one with an MTD of 24 hours.
An organization can easily calculate its MTD by looking at the number of daily employees required to run it operations. This can vary from a few dozen to several thousand depending on the type of business.
How can you calculate your own MTD
When you calculate MTD, you are actually predicting the time it would take for your IT infrastructure to recover from a failure. Waiting for the recovery time does not give you any advantage. However, for some organizations, waiting for the recovery time might have some advantages like higher customer satisfaction or better customer relationship management. For business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning, it is important to know how much downtime is considered acceptable. The most accepted number of hours since many companies do not want to risk their company’s reputation by imperiling customers with severely delayed service. The formula to calculate your own MTD is:
MTD=RPO x (1-RTO)
Where, MTD is the maximum tolerable downtime and RPO is the Recovery Point Objective. RTO is the Recovery Time Objective.
A quick look at the formula reveals that your organization must have a recovery point objective as well as a recovery time objective. Without them, you will not be able to calculate your own MTD.
In addition, you must have a certain percentage of data loss before your organization can embrace the technologies that are designed to help your IT infrastructure recover quickly. Otherwise, you will not be able to measure the effectiveness of the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
What are some of the best ways to prevent or minimize downtime
Backup frequency and the number of backups are also important considerations. The correct backup frequency and length of time requires a plan, as well as the storage volumes to store them. Also, you should have a plan in place for restoring data from these backups if it becomes corrupted or lost. A backup schedule will help you determine how frequently backups need to be done for any given set of data.
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Closely related to the backup frequency is the type of backups. Depending on how much data is being written you may want two types of backups: full and differential. A full backup backs up all the data that has changed since the last full backup (for example, a month or year). A differential backup (or incremental) backs up only the changes since your last full backup. By using incremental backups, data backups are much smaller than if you used a full backup each time.
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If you must store data for a long period of time, consider getting multiple hard drives or other types of storage media (i.e. CDs or DVDs) to store the data on. For example, if the hard drive that contains a lot of data breaks, the data on the backup may be lost. If the extra backup is still available and it has been recently backed up, you can use that backup to restore all of your critical information and data.
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How can you be sure that your mission critical services are always up and running
IT professionals need to understand the importance of keeping mission-critical services running at all times. For example, it would not be a good idea for you to shut down your e-commerce site for maintenance during a peak shopping period like Christmas. That would affect your sales and cause trouble for your customers. You can take many steps to make sure your mission-critical services are up and running at all times. You can minimize downtime by making frequent backups, scheduling maintenance during off-peak hours if you can, and being aware of any upcoming disasters or issues that could affect your services. It is also important to put together an IT service continuity plan.
Though mission-critical services are usually up and running, there are times when a service cannot be used or it has problems. There are ways to identify these problems and to keep your mission-critical services running…. [END OF ARTICLE]
> http://www.cio.com/article/297928/how_can_you_be_sure_your_mission_critical_services_are_always…
This is a good example of the most common kind of article: one that is based on the general idea that a topic has been discussed on similar sites, and it is therefore worth discussing again.
The author looks for information about something that happened in the past or about events scheduled for the future, uses this information to predict what might happen in the future and suggest how you can prevent or respond to these possible issues.
What should you do if an unexpected outage occurs
You should take action to minimize the downtimes as much as you can. For example, if it is not possible to restore your databases from backup, you may have to make some difficult choices. However, many companies choose to change the backup frequency or take out a loan to pay for a server. This can be a very difficult decision thus you should always consider financial costs when making this kind of decision. In addition, you can alert your customers about the issue and direct them to other similar services in the meantime.
The importance of keeping a backup of your system is essential because it provides you with the ability to recover from many types of failure. In addition, when you’re done fixing the problem or moving on, you can put the data back in place or transfer it to another server. So if anything goes wrong, you should make sure that there is a backup fast enough for you to recover in an hour or less.
There are different types of bugs that can cause an unexpected downtime. Many bugs are software related and can be caught with the proper tools. For example, the robots can cause an unexpected downtime. If this type of problem occurs, you should know how to restore the data from a backup after fixing the issue.
However if bugs are hardware related, it’s very difficult to find and fix without experiencing a problem first. In such cases, your services will go down without warning and you will have no way to know how long it will be down until the problems are found. As such, you should still make sure that your backup is up to date and working properly. To do this, make sure that you do regular backups so that you can restore the data in a timely manner.
