A server administrator is gathering business requirements to determine how frequently backups need to be performed on an application server. Which of the following is the administrator attempting to establish?

The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is a business continuity metric that defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss an organization can tolerate, measured in time. By determining how frequently backups need to be performed, the server administrator is directly establishing the RPO. For example, if the business determines it can only afford to lose one hour of data, the RPO is one hour, which dictates that backups must occur at least every hour. This metric is fundamental to designing an effective backup and disaster recovery strategy.

A. MTBF: Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is a reliability metric that predicts the average time a system will operate before a failure occurs; it does not relate to data loss tolerance.
C. MTTR: Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) measures the average time required to restore a failed system to operational status. It concerns the duration of downtime, not the age of the recovered data.
D. RFC: A Request for Change (RFC) is a formal document used in a change management process to propose a modification to an IT system; it is a procedural tool, not a recovery metric.

1. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). (2010). Special Publication 800-34 Rev. 1

Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems. Section 3.3.3

Page 26. "The recovery point objective (RPO) is the point in time

prior to a disruption or system outage

to which mission/business process data can be recovered (given the most recent backup copy of the data) after an outage."

2. Carbone

P.

et al. (2010). CERT® Resilience Management Model (CERT-RMM)

Version 1.2. Carnegie Mellon University

Software Engineering Institute. CMU/SEI-2010-TR-012. Glossary

Page 301. "Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The point in time to which data must be recovered. RPO dictates the frequency of data backup."

3. IBM Cloud Docs. (2023). Understanding RPO and RTO. IBM Corporation. "The recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum targeted period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident... For instance

if the RPO is 1 hour

then backups must be made at least every hour."