The Importance of Recovery Point Objective (RPO) in Your Business Continuity Plan
Commvault, Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026
Commvault explains recovery point objective (RPO), how it pairs with RTO, and how to set tiered RPO targets for critical data.
Commvault's post explains recovery point objective (RPO), the maximum amount of data, measured in time, an organization can lose after a disruption before it can no longer operate acceptably.
RPO pairs with recovery time objective (RTO), with RPO governing data-loss tolerance and RTO governing downtime tolerance, and both should align with business impact analysis. Near-zero RPO is achievable for critical workloads via continuous data protection and synchronous replication, though costs rise steeply, making tiered RPO targets by data criticality a practical approach.
Tighter RPOs also help limit ransomware's blast radius by shrinking the window of exposed data before encryption.