In Your SAP Business Continuity, Do Not Forget Disaster Recovery

Recent years have seen the ERP world radically shift toward cloud adoption with the emergence of the latest technology like automation and AI. This has equally concerned SAP with its cloud strategies, such as RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP. And while the buzz around innovation is exciting, it is also crucial to have a business continuity plan in place that ensures high availability (HA) and timely disaster recovery (DR).

To find out how to achieve the best practice for HA and DR, SAPinsider tuned in to the webinar “Maximizing SAP High Availability and Disaster Recovery with Automated Multitarget: Best Practices and Lessons Learned”, hosted by the leader in HA and DR services provider SIOS.

The first part of this series will explore all things HA and DR in an SAP cloud environment, why specifically DR is crucial for SAP and the benefits and limitations of a side-wide DR plan.

HA is normally the starting point – but pay more attention to DR

According to Harry Aujla, SIOS Partner Alliances Director, while business continuity is a big topic in the technology world, it tends to evolve around HA rather than DR due to disasters being rarer occurrences than general failures. Despite that, DR is critical within a wider SAP continuity for the main reason: DR ensures the continuity of operation and minimizes downside in the event of a disaster – whether natural or man-made.

As the SIOS expert explained, disasters can cause significant disruption to an organization’s SAP system, leading to data loss, system downtime and even loss of revenue. A well-designed DR plan outlines the steps to be taken in the event of a disaster, including backup and recovery procedures, data restoration and the restoration of essential systems. With this in mind, the plan should be regularly tested and updated to ensure it remains effective in the face of new threats and changes in the organization’s SAP environment.

Additionally, having a DR plan in place helps an organization comply with any regulatory requirements that they may be facing: “There’re many industries today that have strict guidelines for data protection and recovery procedures, and ultimately, the net outcome of these DR elements is to help organizations reduce risk,” Aujla said.

Why site-wide DR plan may not be for you

As SAP users know, cloud offers an array of benefits, and most applications will have HA and DR capabilities in place. However, there are some nuances that cloud platform customers should be aware of. As Aujla explained, when the cloud platform providers are discussing availability, they’re referring to the availability of the cloud, not availability in the cloud.

“So, for example, if a cloud instance fails, they will take the necessary steps to recover that instance for you. However, if the application or the database within the cloud instance fails, that responsibility for availability protection falls on the customer,” Aujla pointed out.

The same logic falls on DR: The cloud vendors will offer many types of DR features, capabilities and services, but “most of these are based on the premise of a site-wide DR failover, where it’s a bit of an all-or-nothing approach,” the expert said.

He explained that a site-wide recovery plan can bring valuable benefits, such as the insurance that all your applications and systems within the organization are protected and recoverable in the event of a disaster, as well as the ability to manage the recovery process from a centralized location, simplifying the recovery process.

However, some limitations come with it, including complexity, especially for large organizations with diverse applications and systems, which requires careful planning, coordination and regular testing to ensure the effectiveness of the recovery strategy.

Additionally, a site-wide DR approach typically involves a significant initial investment in terms of infrastructure, hardware, software and networking capabilities and this cost can sometimes be a barrier for organizations that may be working with a limited budget.

Aujla added: “You could be in a position whereby only one of your applications needs to failover to the DR point, but a site-wide DR failover means you have to fail over all of your applications and databases, regardless of the fact that they could still be running as normal sitewide.

“Failovers work well if your application and your databases have the same availability SLA, but if they differ, you may need to consider a more granular approach, where DR is managed at an application level,” he concluded.

So, one alternative that organizations can consider is an application or database-level DR. How it works and the specific pain points in an SAP environment that users should pay attention to will be explored in the next part of this article series.