List your critical systems, get a suggested recovery tier from each one's Maximum Tolerable Downtime, and catch the gaps between what you're planning for and what your recovery strategy can actually deliver - before an outage finds them for you.
The recovery tiers here (Mission Critical / Business Essential / Important / Deferrable) follow the standard Business Impact Analysis methodology taught in continuity-planning frameworks like NIST SP 800-34 and ISO 22301 - BIA, MTD, RTO/RPO, tiered recovery priority. What those frameworks describe is the process for deriving tiers from your own business impact analysis, not a universal set of hour thresholds. The 4/24/72-hour cutoffs used here are a reasonable illustrative default, not a citation - a hospital's "mission critical" and a small online store's are genuinely different numbers, so treat the tier this tool suggests as a starting point and adjust your own MTD figures until the tiers actually reflect your business.
Same reasoning applies to the "achievable RPO" figures behind the data-loss-risk flag below: they're a rule-of-thumb mapping from recovery strategy to typical replication frequency, not a guarantee about any specific vendor or product. If your actual backup tooling beats the rule of thumb, trust your own numbers over the flag.
Related terms: RTO • RPO • BCDR • Disaster Recovery
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