recovery point objective (RPO)

An amount of time, as determined by the utility, that defines the point in time to which data must be recovered after an outage. The number of minutes that an energy provider determines is an acceptable loss of data. For example, if the utility determines that their RPO is 15 minutes, then after the system recovers from a failure, data must be restored to within 15 minutes of the beginning of the failure. The data must be restored to within 15 minutes of the beginning of the failure, even if it took longer than 15 minutes for the system to be restored. The RPO is not how long the system can be down, but the acceptable amount of data that can be forfeited during the down-time.