What does Recovery Point Objective (RPO) indicate?

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is a critical metric in business continuity and disaster recovery planning. It refers to the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. Essentially, it indicates the point in time to which data must be restored after a disaster to ensure that business operations can continue with minimal disruption. An RPO of one hour, for example, means that in the event of a failure, you must be able to restore data up to one hour before the incident occurred. This ensures that any data generated in that preceding hour would be lost, but no more than that.

The other options do not capture the essence of what RPO represents. While it is relevant to assess the overall impact of downtime incidents or the costs associated with data backups, those concepts pertain more to availability and budgeting rather than to the specific recovery target for data restoration. The time taken to recover from a disaster relates more closely to Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which is separate from RPO. Thus, option B accurately reflects what RPO measures in terms of data recovery during business continuity practices.