What Is a Recovery Point Objective (RPO)?

Future planning is essential for most, if not all, businesses. A good business continuity plan includes preparing businesses for the worst. Whether it's natural disasters, cyberattacks, system failures, or unprecedented global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, creating a robust disaster recovery plan protects your business's future.

To determine how quickly they can return to normal business operations, organisations rely on recovery point objectives, often in conjunction with recovery time objectives. Together, they form the two key parameters that define your disaster recovery strategy and guide resource allocation decisions.

Understanding RPO meaning is essential for any organisation looking to protect its critical data and ensure business continuity.

What Does Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Mean?

A recovery point objective refers to how much data loss a company can endure before suffering irreversible damage. The scenario in which a company may lose a significant amount of data tends to be unforeseen events, such as a cyberattack or system failure.

In practical terms, RPOs measure the maximum acceptable amount of data loss over a specific period of time. It calculates:

• How much data will be lost after an unprecedented incident
• How frequently you need to back up your data
• What internal resources need to be accessible during and after a disaster for sustained recovery

IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that the cost of a data breach for companies ranged from £3.11 million per year to £3.78 million. RPOs help prevent these costly losses by determining what systems need to be in place for a strong recovery process.

Beyond direct costs, data loss can impact revenue through service disruptions, lost customer transactions, and reputational damage.

What Is the Difference Between a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO)?

These metrics are often calculated as part of a wider disaster recovery plan. Though they work in conjunction, they measure different data.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

An RPO helps determine how much data a business can tolerate losing during a disaster. Businesses must decide the maximum amount of data the business can lose for each critical system before calculating their required backup frequency. This is measured in time: from when the major incident occurred to the last data backup.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

An RTO calculates the maximum recovery time a business has to restore systems after a failure. They also ensure businesses remain compliant with regulations, especially if they operate in sensitive sectors such as healthcare or finance.

Why Are RPOs Important?

In the current digital era, businesses must navigate a myriad of potential threats, from cyber hacks to technological outages. Having an adequate RPO in place not only ensures the business knows its recovery objectives, but it also can prevent significant harm from unexpected events.

In 2017, GitLab lost six hours of database data (issues, merge requests, users, comments, etc). They quickly discovered that their database backups were either inefficient or not set up correctly. This prevented them from returning to normal operations for an extended period, and they had to expend enormous effort in data recovery.

Their RPO solution has since dropped from 48 hours to 41 minutes in an effort to improve their recovery systems should a similar incident occur.

Regular testing and an informed RPO are crucial for businesses that want to keep ahead of the damage caused by disruptive events.

How Do You Calculate RPO?

All businesses will have unique RPOs, so considering industry standards is often helpful information to keep in mind. Setting an objective RPO requires analysing your business's tolerance for data loss and operational downtime.

Begin by identifying your critical workloads and business-critical applications. Then determine how much data loss is unacceptable for each system and calculate how much data the business can afford to lose. You must also know how frequently the data is updated for each workload. If you operate with highly operational systems, the business may require near-zero RPOs.

Establishing data priority levels across your organisation is critical—not all data requires the same level of protection.

Once you've calculated the frequency of data updates, you can ensure your solution operates within the required time frame.

Example: Let's consider an e-commerce store. It has established that it must take a tiered approach to determining its RPOs. For example, the payment gateways that process customer transactions and shipping databases have a near-zero RPO; senior management has decided to implement Continuous Data Protection (CDP) to safeguard this data. However, they can set a lower RPO of four hours for their marketing data, which is non-critical.

Determining RPOs also has the added benefit of helping gauge whether or not you're meeting your customer service level agreements (SLA). If your RTOs and RPOs are regularly breached during or after an incident, this is a strong indication that you may need to reconsider your disaster recovery strategy.

What Factors Impact Calculating RPO?

Internal and external factors will play a large role in calculating your RPO, as your business is shaped by unique circumstances.

The Frequency of Your Data Updates

Frequently assessing your data backups and the snapshots you have of critical data allows you to implement the necessary measures to protect your services if a disaster occurs. Without consistent insight into the operating scope of your data backup, it'll be challenging to adequately prepare.

Data backups are only effective if they align with your RPO. A scheduled backup running every 24 hours means you could lose 24 hours of data. Organisations handling mission-critical data often implement Continuous Data Protection (CPD) to achieve near-zero RPOs.

How You Store Your Data

How you store your data and configure backup storage will have an impact on your RPO because it impacts how quickly you can retrieve the information after a disaster or disruption.

Common data storage options include:

• Physical appliances
• The Cloud
• Off-site storage

Your Business Industry

Determine what the standard is for the industry you operate in, and take into consideration what your critical systems are and whether you handle sensitive information. Different industries have vastly different RPO requirements based on their operational needs and risk profiles.

Understanding industry benchmarks helps you set realistic and competitive RPO targets while keeping you protected against sector-specific risks.

Compliance and Regulations

Do you adhere to a compliance framework with its own requirements and guidelines? If so, you'll need to consider this when setting an RPO.

Regulatory frameworks often mandate specific data protection and recovery requirements that directly impact your RPO. Failure to meet regulatory requirements can result in severe penalties, legal consequences, and reputational damage.

What Are Typical RPO Intervals?

Businesses may want to take a tiered approach to determining RPO, as different business units will have different systems and different processes.

Zero to One Hour

This is a very short interval and is often for critical operations that cannot afford to lose more than an hour of data. These intervals are very common with businesses that hold sensitive data, such as patient records or banking transactions.

Core banking systems often have RPOs of seconds to near-zero, which is known as continuous replication.

One to Four Hours

A common interval for e-commerce or retail businesses with inventory management or customer databases. Generally, business systems such as emails or ERP systems often have this interval.

Four to 24 Hours

Less critical business units, such as marketing or analytics departments, can have intervals of 24 hours. Administrative systems or quality management in manufacturing are also more likely to have longer RPOs.

The tighter the RPO, the higher the cost due to more frequent backups and the replication infrastructure needed.

How To Optimise Your RPO?

An RPO shouldn't be taken as a static measurement. As your business evolves, you'll need to test and measure the adequacy of your RPO and wider disaster recovery plan.

Increase Backup Frequency

More frequent backups enable you to save more data should there be a period of failure or downtime. Increasing your backup frequency can be costly, but it's more cost-efficient and far less stressful to know your data is continuously protected than scrambling to invest in a data-salvaging project after an incident.

Replicate Your Data

Secondary copies of data create a 'failover' that an organisation can switch to in the case of an outage or cyberattack. This limits the data loss, but the frequency of data replication is what will ultimately determine the RPO.

Switch to Advanced Technology

Exploring new solutions such as Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and advanced data replication does have cost implications, but allows data to be backed up in real-time, which greatly increases the chance of data recovery.

Future-Proof Your Business With a Business Continuity Plan

A system failure or cyber attack can happen to businesses of all sizes. RPO adoptions across all business units ensure comprehensive protection and faster recovery when disasters strike.

Set your business up for security and success with a business continuity plan that will navigate you through the unexpected. C2's business continuity software and IT disaster recovery solution create comprehensive planning for actionable and rapid recovery.

Book your C2 demo today and discover how we can help safeguard your business and IT infrastructure.