Secure Your Digital Legacy: Celebrating World Backup Day

A ride in the Paris metro is all it takes, sometimes. Your world is in your back pocket and before you know it, it’s in the hands of a slick pickpocket and your little rectangular piece of everything is gone. Did you know that 113 phones are lost or stolen every minute? Or that 20% of data loss cases are caused by accident? To add to the pain, 21% of people have never made a backup and 30% of all computers are already infected with malware. In a business context, the frequency of ransomware attacks on companies is increasing: In 2021, 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware attacks with 32% paying the ransom and only around 65% eventually getting their data back.

In SAP’s cloud ERP, we believe in stopping issues as early as possible. Within any SaaS organization like ours, we’re liable if anything happens in the cloud, especially since we have the most expertise in running our software. There are many layers of security. People that operate network security, physical security of data centers, people dealing with monitoring our logs and event queues to see if there is an attack that is of a significant threat level. Are they heavy blow attacks or just scratches on the surface? The software is hardened from the ground up using industry standards and best practices. We invest significantly into security, and with extensive security training for our developers and experts, every employee carries responsibility for the security of our products.

Though loss of data is no laughing matter, some of us surely remember some ‘fun’ stories from back in the day when carelessness lead to loss of data. Like that time a freak storm fried your server? Or when the new intern ran an update query and erased the whole database? You can always count on Paul Saunders from Cloud ERP to have a good tale: “When my wife was doing her Master’s degree she always saved her work on a floppy disk. I told her that was a really bad idea because floppy disks could be corrupted or lost. I proceeded to lecture her in the different levels of RAID and what they all meant and told her that she should always save to our external secure hard drive that was really meant for an industrial data centre. Anyway, the day before she is due to submit her Master’s thesis I decided that I should repartition the RAID drives. And while doing so one of the drives failed, so I reformatted it. But I reformatted the wrong one and wiped her entire thesis. I went to her in a blind panic explaining in a rambling jargon of technical terms what had happened. She then pulled out her trusted floppy disk and told me that she had just continued to save it to that the whole time and that she used the backup because I wouldn't shut up about it. Crisis averted. Husband humbled… at least temporarily...”

The stories keep coming. Udo Klein, from Cloud ERP recounts, “I grew up in a small village. In 1985, I had a Commodore 64 and a VC 1541 floppy drive. At that time this was cutting edge technology – at least if you lived in a small village, that is… At that time, I wanted to have a digitized map of Europe. Unfortunately, scanners were completely out of my reach, so I hand digitized the maps that I wanted. This was a lot of effort and I thought that I better not lose these maps. So, this was the first backup that I ever created. And because I deemed this data so valuable I actually made ‘two’ backups.

You have to understand that the VC 1541 only used one side of a disk, but you could cut an additional hole into the side of the disk covers, turn them around, and use both sides to double the capacity giving you 2 x 170 kilobytes. Since I didn’t have a lot of money, I did this and had my ‘two’ backups on different sides of the same disk. Of course, eventually I lost my primary data due to a drive defect and when I tried to restore it from the backup, the defective drive destroyed both backups in one go. And those were two harsh lessons in backups: You need at least two backups, and they must be “separated”. This still matters today. Imagine if you have just one cloud-based backup. If this fails, remember the golden rule: “No backup, no mercy”

Abhinaya Murthy from our organization has a tale to tell as well: "My parents had an HP desktop for a number of years, so it had accumulated all sorts of documents, pictures, etc. While I was on Christmas break from college, the hard drive started clicking followed shortly by the machine crashing. I ordered a new drive to get Windows back up and running. Remembering that one of my professors put a hard drive in the freezer for a few hours so he could recover data, I figured there was nothing to lose at this point. I’m happy to report that I was able to pull all my parent’s data off the drive before it finally died for good! Thankfully I do not recall any real horror-story from my work-positions on data going poof.”*knocks on wood*

Patrick Boch from the Cloud ERP security team says, “Being in Cybersecurity, I was always aware that backups are important, and installed a commercial NAS (Network Attached Storage) at home, plus a sync of my data to the cloud. After a few years I decided that I could replace this commercial solution with a mix of DIY/open-source solutions – and that worked fine. However, whenever an update resulted in a breaking change, I had to retrieve all that knowledge for setting up this DIY solution again – knowledge which I didn’t use in years. Which lead me to go back to the commercial solution again. And the bonus was that I actually rediscovered some files which I had thought were lost.”

This is where we need to emphasise: If you’re worried about how we back up customer data in our SAP S/4HANA Cloud – don’t be. Besides our high availability services, which ensure that our customers will be up and running continuously, we utilize several methods of backing up data for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition – including regular data and archive logs backups. In fact, productive systems are backed up daily, and kept for 28 days, whereas non-productive systems are backed up weekly and kept for 14 days. All data is stored in an offsite, secure location, ensuring data safety and redundancy. Additionally, there are a few selected apps within SAP S/4HANA, such as Customer Data Return, which will enable you to back up some data yourself. And for the very unlikely event of an emergency, such as data corruption and other irreparable situations, a restore of your data is also available.

Speaking of which, I have a feeling I might have a data loss story of my own. Ironically, sadly, it’s been lost in my mental data and I can no longer recall it.