Any application needs to define service availability in an aspect of a Service-Level Agreement (SLA). Organizations define SLAs to ensure application availability and reliability for their users. You may want to define an SLA, saying my application should be 99.9% available in a given year or the organization can tolerate it if the application is down for 43 minutes per month, and so on. The RPO and RTO for an application is mostly driven by the defined SLA.
The RPO is the amount of data loss an organization can tolerate in the aspect of time. For example, my application is fine if it loses 15 minutes' worth of data. The RPO helps to define a data backup strategy. The RTO is about application downtime and how much time my application should take to recover and function normally after failure incidence. The following diagram illustrates the difference between the RTO and RPO:
In the preceding diagram, suppose the failure occurs at 10 A.M. and...
