They answer two different « how much » questions after a disaster. RPO — Recovery Point Objective — is about data loss: how far back are you willing to lose work? If your RPO is one hour, you must back up at least hourly, because you accept losing up to an hour's changes. RTO — Recovery Time Objective — is about downtime: how long can the service be unavailable before it seriously hurts? If your RTO is four hours, your recovery procedures and resources must be able to restore service within four hours. RPO shapes how often you protect data; RTO shapes how fast and how prepared your recovery must be. Setting both, honestly and per system, turns vague fear into a concrete, buildable plan.

Yes, though it should be proportionate. A small organization is often more vulnerable, not less, because it lacks spare capacity to absorb a serious outage — a week without its core system can be existential. The plan does not need to be elaborate: identify the few systems the business truly cannot run without, set realistic RPO and RTO for them, ensure backups (with an offline copy) meet those targets, write down the recovery steps, and rehearse a restore at least occasionally. That modest effort is the difference between a bad incident being a costly inconvenience and being a company-ending event. The scale of the plan should match the stakes, but the discipline is essential at any size.