Recovery point objective (RPO)

The recovery point objective is the maximum amount of data, measured in time, that an organization can afford to lose after an outage or incident before the loss becomes unacceptable.

RPO answers the question: how far back in time can we go when restoring? If your backups run once a night, your RPO is effectively up to 24 hours, meaning a failure late in the day could wipe out a full day of work. Systems that change constantly, such as accounting or order entry, usually need a shorter RPO than archived files.

For an Alberta business, losing a day of transactions, job site records or client communications may be inconvenient or it may be very costly. Defining RPO in business terms helps you decide how often backups or replication should run and how much to spend on them.

Practical tip: sit down with your IT provider and set an RPO for each key system rather than one figure for everything. Then confirm the backup schedule actually meets those targets and test it by restoring real data. RPO works hand in hand with your recovery time objective.