RTO / RPO

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the maximum acceptable time to get a system back online after an incident; RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum acceptable amount of data, measured in time, you can afford to lose. Together they turn "we have backups" into a testable target — an RPO of one hour means hourly backups, an RTO of four hours shapes how you architect recovery. Continuity and DR plans are written against these numbers.