A systems administrator is collaborating with business stakeholders to update the disaster recovery plan for a critical database server. The stakeholders have determined that in the event of a catastrophic failure, the business can withstand a maximum of 15 minutes of data loss. Which of the following metrics does this requirement define?
The correct answer is Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RPO defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, measured in time, that a business can tolerate. In this scenario, the 15-minute tolerance for data loss is the RPO.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is incorrect because it specifies the maximum time allowed to recover the system and restore service after a failure, not the amount of data that can be lost.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal contract between a service provider and a customer that documents service expectations. While an SLA would likely contain the required RPO and RTO values, it is the agreement itself, not the specific metric for data loss tolerance.
Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) is a historical metric representing the average time it has taken to recover from past failures. It is a measure of performance, not a forward-looking planning objective like RPO or RTO.