The primary factor to determine system criticality within an organization is the maximum allowable downtime (MAD). MAD is the maximum time frame during which recovery must become effective before an outage compromises the ability of an organization to achieve its business objectives and/or survival. MAD reflects the business impact of a system outage on the organization's operations, reputation, compliance, and finances. MAD can help to prioritize system recovery efforts, allocate resources, and establish recovery objectives.