Is the statement 'RTO should be equal to or less than MAO' true or false, and why?

The statement is: "RTO should be equal to or less than MAO."

• RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster to avoid unacceptable consequences.
• MAO (Maximum Acceptable Outage), also known as MTPD (Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption), is the maximum period of time that an organization can tolerate a particular business function or process being unavailable before the impact becomes unacceptable.

For effective business continuity, the time it takes to recover a critical function (RTO) must not exceed the maximum time the organization can tolerate that function being down (MAO). If RTO > MAO, the recovery plan would fail to prevent unacceptable consequences. Therefore, the RTO must always be set to be equal to or less than the MAO.

The correct answer is $\text{True}$.