Powering Resilient SAP Landscapes: Infrastructure Best Practices for the Modern Enterprise
Key Takeaways
⇨ Prioritize high availability and disaster recovery by integrating robust HA architectures and tested DR strategies to ensure business continuity.
⇨ Design flexible, platform-agnostic infrastructure that can adapt to evolving SAP demands and leverage containers for scalability across cloud environments.
⇨ Embed security and automation into operations, focusing on proactive measures and streamlined management to reduce risks and enhance scalability.
SAP infrastructure is a key business enabler in today’s always-on, cloud-connected world. Downtime delays decisions. Performance gaps hinder growth. And inflexible systems can stall transformation before it starts. To keep pace, enterprises need more than “good enough” infrastructure. They need a strategy built for resilience, agility, and long-term success.
For SAP technology leaders, that means designing infrastructure that adapts as fast as your business evolves—whether you’re supporting ECC on-prem, scaling S/4HANA in the cloud, or deploying containerized workloads across hybrid environments.
The following best practices provide a clear blueprint for building SAP landscapes that are not only stable and secure—but ready for whatever comes next.
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Design for High Availability and Disaster Recovery
If your SAP system supports finance, logistics, or customer experience, it can’t afford to go offline. That’s why high availability (HA) should be baked into your architecture from day one.
Think beyond basic failover. Implement system replication for SAP HANA, scale across nodes to eliminate single points of failure, and configure robust cluster setups for S/4HANA and NetWeaver.
And don’t stop there. Build a real disaster recovery (DR) plan. Define your RTO and RPO targets, identify DR sites, automate failovers, and test regularly. The best infrastructure isn’t just highly available—it’s bulletproof.
Build with Flexibility to Support Strategic Agility
SAP environments don’t stand still. As cloud services evolve and workloads shift, your infrastructure needs to adapt.
That starts with platform-agnostic design. Use a consistent, supported Linux foundation across all server-side components. Embrace containers and Kubernetes for new SAP services like Integration Suite. With container orchestration in place, you can deploy across clouds and stay in control of your environment.
Portable infrastructure means faster innovation and fewer regrets.
Strengthen Security Without Compromising Uptime
Security can’t be an afterthought. Especially when your ERP system touches financials, supply chains, and customer data.
Stay ahead of threats with a proactive security strategy. Patch early and often, use live patching to address kernel-level vulnerabilities without rebooting. And don’t just assume you’re secure. Validate everything. Regular vulnerability scans, compliance checks, and penetration testing should be part of your normal operating rhythm.
Automate Operations to Scale with Confidence
Modern SAP landscapes are complex, but they don’t have to be difficult to manage. Automation tools give you speed, consistency, and the freedom to focus on innovation.
From infrastructure provisioning and cluster creation to backup and monitoring, automate wherever possible. Use infrastructure-as-code to spin up entire environments on demand and centralize patching and configuration across hybrid deployments.
And remember, a resilient infrastructure strategy doesn’t end at go-live. It’s a living, evolving roadmap that aligns with your SAP software lifecycle, OS updates, hardware refreshes, and cloud migration plans.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
Prioritize high availability and disaster recovery to protect business continuity. SAP systems power mission-critical operations—from financial transactions to supply chain logistics. To minimize the risk of disruption, build HA architectures into every deployment and pair them with tested DR strategies. Define RTO/RPO goals aligned to business impact, automate failovers, and regularly test recovery procedures to ensure readiness in real-world scenarios.
Design for portability and future flexibility across cloud and hybrid environments. As SAP evolves with cloud-native tools and containerized services, infrastructure must be adaptable. Standardize on platform-agnostic components such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Kubernetes to maintain flexibility across providers. This approach allows you to scale easily, avoid lock-in, and accelerate adoption of new SAP innovations without major rework.
Embed security and automation into operations for long-term scalability and control. Security threats and operational complexity increase with scale. Automate patching, compliance checks, and infrastructure provisioning to streamline management while reducing risk. Leverage solutions like live patching to apply critical updates without downtime and build in monitoring and alerting from day one to maintain performance and visibility.
