Which criterion is crucial for determining acceptable downtime when developing a disaster recovery plan?

Determining acceptable downtime in a disaster recovery plan is fundamentally linked to the concept of Maximum Tolerable Outage (MTO). The Maximum Tolerable Outage represents the longest duration of time that a system, service, or operation can be unavailable after a disruptive event before causing unacceptable consequences for the organization. Knowing this threshold helps organizations establish recovery time objectives and ensures that they can allocate the necessary resources and strategies to restore their operations within acceptable limits.

When organizations understand their MTO, they can effectively formulate their disaster recovery strategies, prioritize systems, and make informed decisions about backup and restoration processes. It serves as a guiding metric that shapes the overall planning and implementation of disaster recovery efforts, ensuring that critical business functions can resume in a timely manner.

In contrast, other options such as Annual Loss Expectancy, Service Delivery Objective, and Quantity of Orphan Data may contribute to the broader risk management framework but do not directly define the acceptable downtime like the Maximum Tolerable Outage does.