Which of the following objectives defines a maximum period in which data might be lost due to a major outage or failure in a cloud environment?

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) defines the maximum acceptable duration of downtime after a failure - how quickly systems must be restored - not how much data may be lost during that period.

RPO specifies the maximum acceptable time window during which data may be unrecoverable following a major outage - for example, an RPO of 2 hours means up to 2 hours of data could be permanently lost. This metric directly drives backup frequency, snapshot scheduling, and replication intervals in cloud disaster recovery architectures. It answers the question 'how old can our restored data be?' rather than 'how fast must we recover?'

MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is a reliability metric measuring the average operational time between failures and is used for hardware lifecycle planning, not for quantifying acceptable data loss.

MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) measures the average time needed to restore a failed component or system to operation and addresses repair speed, not the boundaries of data loss tolerance.