The RPO indicates how much data the business can lose before it is unacceptable. (For example, the business has a manual process that will allow two days [48 hours] of work to get re-entered into the system resulting in an RPO of 48 hours. Anything beyond 48 hours of lost data would be unacceptable to business operations.)
The RPO is also how much data is expected to be lost by IT systems and applications during an IT disruption or due to an Information Technology Disaster. (For example, application data is backed up nightly resulting in an RPO of 24 hours, so the business can expect to lose up to 24 hours of data when the system is restored to operations).
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