AZ-900 Practice Question 83: RTO vs RPO

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 9 · question 3 of 10

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A business continuity plan states that, if a disaster takes down the primary system, the application must be back online within four hours, and no more than fifteen minutes of the most recent data may be lost. Which two terms describe these two requirements, in the same order?

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Answer:

B. Recovery Time Objective, then Recovery Point Objective

A disaster recovery plan must specify both figures, and Microsoft defines them precisely: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum duration of acceptable *downtime* in the event of a disaster, measured in units of time such as "four hours"; that is the "back online within four hours" requirement. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum duration of acceptable *data loss*, also measured in time, such as "fifteen minutes of data"; that is the second requirement. RTO answers "how long can we be down," and RPO answers "how much data can we afford to lose."

Option A reverses the two definitions, matching downtime to RPO and data loss to RTO. Option C mixes in an unrelated term: an SLA is a provider's published uptime or performance guarantee for a service, not a customer's own recovery target, so it doesn't describe the first requirement at all. Option D substitutes informal terms that aren't the documented DR metrics; mean time to recovery is an operational measurement of past incidents, and uptime percentage describes ongoing availability, not a disaster-recovery target set in advance.

Reference: What are Business Continuity, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery?

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