Building a Solid Contingency Plan to Avoid Downtime with SAP

Greg White, Director of Global Alliances marketing, Commvault

Greg White, Director of Global Alliances marketing, Commvault

Being Vigilant

When it comes to SAP implementation, there are a few surprises that might pop up that CIOs should be aware of. The first is that dev and test in SAP can take up a lot of disk space, so it’s imperative that copy data is managed efficiently.

“To reduce risk of data loss and to increase the overall IT value in providing automation, ensure that the SAP environments are properly secured and backed up.”

CIOs should ensure that there is a way to manage tracking and decommissioning of one-off SAP sandbox systems, which were created for specific prototyping, testing or training, making them easy to be forgotten over time. The cost can also be a surprise SAP can be a significant investment, so CIOs should be aware and make sure their business has the data protection and backup and recovery solutions in place to make that investment worth it.

Key to Success

One key to success lies in designing SAP data protection properly to ensure that SAP downtime is kept to the absolute minimum. To

do so, keep tools and operational procedures in place to ensure that SAP Availability SLAs are always met. As a result of high data growth, SAP production systems face performance degradation over time, which can easily have a direct impact on the business. Therefore, it is key to have strategies and tools in place for identifying obsolete business data that can be archived out of the production systems on a regular basis to keep those systems lean and performing well.

As the environment becomes more complex, the way you protect and manage it becomes more important, as the difference between well- and poorly-designed SAP data management can mean the difference between moving a business forward and holding it back. For that reason, businesses need to ensure that they have a solid contingency plan to avoid downtime with SAP at all costs and should look for partners that offer deduplication to reduce the storage footprint, the protection of multiple database copies that is both efficient and reliable as well as access to cloud (including private, public and hybrid) deployments.

Dodging the Bullets

To reduce risk of data loss and to increase the overall IT value in providing automation, ensure that the SAP environments are properly secured and backed up. Make sure that specific needs and requirements of your business and infrastructure are appropriately identified in order to correctly deploy a data management solution. Finally, an effective strategy means you need to keep in mind cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment options, and look for a solution that will support seamless migration in the move to the chosen SAP deployment.

An Advice to CIOs

Look into what other solutions and strategies you will have to roll out with the HANA implementation this includes data management and protection, backup and recovery, deduplication, cloud integration, and more.