(
Recovery
Point
Objective) The longest period of time that newly entered data can be lost in an organization in the event of a major failure. The RPO determines how often backups must be performed, and they can differ for each department. For example, financial data may have an RPO of one minute, while blogs and other written material may be given a one-hour RPO.
RPO vs. RTO
The RPO determines the frequency of backups, whereas the "recovery time objective" (RTO) states the maximum length of time it should take to restore the data after a failure. See
RTO.