What does RPO represent in disaster recovery planning?

• A. Maximum acceptable downtime before service is restored
• B. Duration of the outage after failover
• C. Maximum acceptable data loss measured in time
• D. Time required to restore full operations

Answer: (C)

RPO is about how much data you can afford to lose if a disaster happens. It defines the maximum amount of data loss, measured in time, that your organization is willing to accept between the last good backup (or replication point) and the moment operations can resume. It drives how often you back up or how frequently you replicate data—shorter RPOs require more frequent protection.

For example, if your backups run every hour, your RPO is up to one hour—if a disruption occurs just after a backup, you could lose up to an hour of data. This is different from downtime or how long it takes to get systems back up; those aspects are described by the RTO (Recovery Time Objective), not the data loss expressed by the RPO.