Which metric defines the maximum amount of data loss tolerated in a disaster scenario?

• A. Recovery Time Objective
• B. Recovery Point Objective
• C. Mean Time Between Failures
• D. Availability

Answer: (B)

RPO defines the maximum amount of data loss an organization is willing to tolerate after a disaster. It represents the latest point in time to which data must be restored, so the practical effect is how much data could be lost between the last backup or replication and the time of a disruption. For example, an RPO of one hour means you should back up or synchronize data at least every hour to limit data loss to at most one hour. In contrast, recovery time objective concerns how long it takes to restore operations (downtime), not how much data might be lost. Mean time between failures is a reliability metric about how often components fail, and availability is the overall uptime percentage. Thus, the metric that describes the tolerable data loss is the RPO.