Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data loss (measured in time) a business can tolerate after a disaster. An RPO of 15 minutes means backups or replication must run at least every 15 minutes; an RPO of zero requires synchronous…
Also known as: Recovery Point Target
RPO drives backup frequency and replication strategy. A payments database with an RPO of zero needs synchronous multi-region replication. A marketing analytics warehouse with an RPO of 24 hours can rely on nightly snapshots.
RPO and RTO are set together but answer different questions: RPO is 'how much data can we lose?', RTO is 'how long can we be down?'. Both belong in the service catalogue alongside the SLA.
RPO decides your backup bill. Sub-minute RPOs cost 10-100x more than daily-snapshot RPOs. Pinning down RPO per service prevents both under-investment (losing a day of orders) and over-investment (paying enterprise replication fees for a static marketing page).