What is DRaaS for SAP and Why you Need it for your Business

Technology plays an important role in today’s business world. It allows businesses to enhance their productivity, automate their processes, and give value to their customers. One of the most popular and effective technologies that are used by businesses all over the world is SAP.??

SAP provides enterprises with software such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and business intelligence (BI). These help businesses manage their data, supply, customer relationships, and other fields. But technologies come with their own set of risks and challenges.?

Disaster is one of the biggest threats to disrupt or halt business operations. It can be of any form, such as an earthquake, power outage, forest fire, or man-made event. These threats can devastate the SAP workloads and cause data loss, downtime, and performance degradation. Moreover, this could also lead to reputational damage, financial loss, and customer dissatisfaction with the company.?

This is why a reliable Disaster Recovery (DR) plan is necessary for businesses with SAP integration. Disaster Recovery is a process of regaining your data and functionality after the strike of a disaster or any unfortunate event. Also, it should be part of Business Continuity for every organization.

Disaster Recovery as a Service for SAP

Setting up a Disaster Recovery Plan for your SAP workloads is difficult due to the complexity, specific requirements, and dependencies. Also, maintaining a secondary site, physical infrastructure, connectivity, storage capacity, etc., could be costly.

This is why many businesses opt for a cloud-based recovery solution for their Disaster Recovery needs. This solution helps the organization replicate its SAP data and applications to the cloud within minutes. The data can be retrieved anytime in case of a disaster, continuing business operations and minimizing downtime. The solution is known as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Some of the additional benefits that Disaster Recovery as a Service for SAP provides over traditional recovery methods are:

• Cost-effective:

With Disaster Recovery as Service in place, there will be no need to maintain a secondary site with expensive equipment and resources. The DraaS provider will only charge for resources used during the replication and recovery.?

• Scalability:?

The resources provided by the DRaaS can scale up or down according to the need and complexity of your SAP workloads. For instance, the resource allocation size will increase according to the size of your SAP data and vice versa. This ensures that you are only paying for the resources that you are using.

• Easy Testing:

Usually, during the testing of the DR plan, the main environment is affected and disrupts the operations. However, the DRaaS ensures that the testing is done in an isolated environment on the cloud and that the main environment is not disrupted.??

• Instant Recovery:

Using effective tools and processes, DRaaS can achieve lower RPO and RTO for your business. It can instantly restore the SAP workloads from the cloud.?

How to choose a suitable DRaaS provider for SAP?

Not all DRaaS providers are equal in supporting SAP systems and workloads. Some of the factors that organizations should look for when selecting a DRaaS provider for SAP are:

• Compatibility:

The DRaaS provider should be able to support different versions and modules of SAP software and other operating systems, databases, platforms, and applications integrated with SAP.?

The provider should also be able to handle the specific requirements and challenges of SAP HANA, such as high memory consumption, data compression, and encryption.

• Integration:?

The DRaaS provider should be able to integrate seamlessly with the organization's existing IT infrastructure and processes. The provider should offer tools and APIs to automate and simplify the replication and recovery of the SAP systems and data.

• Security:

The DRaaS provider should adhere to the highest security and compliance standards when handling the SAP systems and data. The provider should encrypt the data in transit and at rest, implement firewalls and antivirus software, and comply with relevant regulations and policies.

Conclusion

Disaster recovery is a critical aspect of any business that uses SAP. A disaster can cause significant damage and disrupt the SAP systems and workloads essential for business continuity. Therefore, organizations need to have a robust and reliable DR plan to protect their SAP systems and data from any disaster.