RPO

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= Recovery Point Objective =

A “recovery point objective” or “RPO”, is defined by business continuity planning.

It is the ** maximum tolerable period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident **.
The RPO gives systems designers a limit to work to. For instance, if the RPO is set to 4 hours, then in practice, offsite mirrored backups must be continuously maintained - a daily offsite backup on tape will not suffice.

Care must be taken to avoid two common mistakes around the use and definition of RPO.
 * 1) Firstly, BC Staff use business impact analysis to determine RPO for each service- RPO is NOT determined by the extant backup regime.
 * 2) Secondly, when any level of preparation of offsite data is required, rather than at the time the backups are offsited - the period during which data is lost very often starts near the time of the beginning of the work to prepare backups which are eventually offsited.

-Wikipedia