What is Recovery Time Objective? Is it different to MTD or MTPoD or MAO?

Recovery time objective (RTO) is the set maximum time a business function or service can be disrupted / not available before it causes serious and irreversable impact on the organization. RTO is set after taking into consideration all the business functions and their respective dependencies.

Maximum Tolerable Disruption (MTD) on the other hand is the maximum time a business functions can disrupted for but without taking into consideration other dependencies. Thus, it is safe to say that RTO <=MTD.

Maximum Tolerable Point of Disrutpion (MTPoD) is the same as MTD. It is a timeframe set by the process owners for their own business functions.

Maximum Allowable Outage (MAO) is the timeframe during which a recovery mist become effecctive before an outage compromises the ability of an organization to achieve its business objectives and or survival. Thus MAO is the same as RTO.