Nutanix Certified Associate Practice Exam

What is a recovery point objective (RPO)?

1. A monitored target for how fast end users can return to work

2. The amount of time a business is willing to tolerate with resources being unavailable

3. A threshold for disk queuing over time

4. The amount of data loss that a business is willing to tolerate

The correct answer is: The amount of data loss that a business is willing to tolerate

A recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the maximum amount of data loss that an organization can tolerate in the event of a disaster, such as a system failure or data corruption. It is a critical component of disaster recovery planning because it helps determine the frequency of data backups and the technical solutions needed to meet the organization's data protection needs. For example, if a company has an RPO of four hours, this means the business is prepared to lose up to four hours of data in the event of a disruption. Therefore, data backups must occur at least every four hours to align with this objective. Understanding RPO is essential for businesses to minimize data loss and ensure continuity of operations, making it a vital metric in disaster recovery strategies and data management practices. The focus here is on the allowable loss of data, which differentiates it from other concepts such as recovery time objective (RTO), which concerns how quickly systems can be restored.