RPO and RTO (recovery objectives)
acronymIT supportgovernance & risk
Recovery point objective is how much data you accept losing, measured backwards from the incident; recovery time objective is how long you accept being down. Together they define what a recovery plan must achieve.
Both are frequently written into policy and never validated, which makes them aspirations rather than objectives. The only thing that converts them is a timed restore: run it on a schedule, measure the actual throughput against the real data volume, and compare. The failures that surface are rarely the backup itself - a missing dependency, an identity provider that is part of the outage, a runbook stored inside the environment it describes. An untested restore is a hypothesis, and stating an objective it has never met is worse than stating none.
Also known as: recovery point objective, recovery time objective, restore test