Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum age of data you can afford to lose, measured in time — for example, four hours of email or 15 minutes of orders. If your RPO is one hour, backups or replication must run at least that often. Tighter RPOs cost more storage and bandwidth but reduce loss during ransomware or accidental bulk deletes. Work with finance and operations to set RPO per system: accounting may need 15 minutes; internal wiki may tolerate 24 hours. Document choices in your DR plan.
