In disaster recovery planning, what does RPO specify?

• A. Maximum tolerable data loss measured in time.
• B. Maximum acceptable downtime.
• C. Recovery cost target.
• D. Security incident threshold.

Answer: (A)

RPO is about data loss tolerance in a disaster scenario. It specifies the maximum amount of data that can be lost, expressed as a time interval, so you know how fresh data must be when systems are back online. This guides how often you back up or replicate data—the shorter the RPO, the more frequent the backups or real-time replication need to be.

This is different from how long the system can be down, which is the RTO. The other options aren’t about data loss extent: one refers to downtime duration, another to cost targets, and another to an unrelated security threshold.