SAP data security is system-relevant - not only in Corona times

Backup is often unloved, but has become increasingly important in IT for a variety of reasons. Legal requirements such as the DSGVO have become increasingly important. In addition, impending data loss due to various causes (logical errors such as human error, viruses, ransomware attacks or even physical errors such as power failure, natural disasters, etc.) jeopardizes business continuity. If data is no longer available for the value creation process in the company, almost everything comes to a standstill. The availability and protection of information represents the most operationally important resource in the enterprise.

A study by the META Group shows that even a ten-day outage of key IT systems (which includes SAP systems) causes such lasting damage to a company that it has a 50 percent probability of disappearing from the market within five years. Other studies show that 93 percent of companies that have been without a data center and data for at least ten days as a result of a total outage file for bankruptcy within a year. This is particularly worrying for SAP customers, as CRM and ERP systems are at the heart of businesses. They are therefore business-critical and require special protection.

These systems, such as SAP, Salesforce, etc., must be handled and secured with great care to ensure business continuity. Final security, especially in the event of logical errors, can only be provided by a high-performance, consistent and reliable backup/recovery solution.

It is important that the data backup solution can be used in different environments, i.e. for on-premises and cloud use and physical as well as virtual infrastructures. Ideally, the backup solution should be able to back up multiple hypervisors, as multiple virtualization platforms are often deployed in an organization and then ideally backed up with one solution. This provides the flexibility to deploy CRM and ERP systems as required and to respond to changes.

Ensure business continuity

When storing data in the cloud, care must be taken to ensure that the rules on data protection according to the GDPR are adhered to. Currently, there are many uncertainties following the ECJ ruling on the Privacy Shield agreement with the USA, where many of the cloud service providers are based. Therefore, German or European solutions are recommended, which can offer legal certainty beyond the cloud issue and also have not implemented any backdoors.

In case of logical errors, the data can only be restored with a working backup to keep the business running.

With all the enthusiasm for high availability solutions and the almost seamless switchover to another system if the first one fails, it is often forgotten that this technology can only catch physical failures (disk crash, fire, etc.).

However, logical errors cannot be corrected with this, because these are immediately written to the second system, which contains the data replica. In such cases, only a backup can help to restore the data and ensure business continuity. Backup/recovery in general and in particular for business-critical SAP systems can be described as system-relevant for all companies in both a narrow and a broader sense, since ultimately only this can ensure the availability of the data and thus also keep the business running.

Especially in corona times, it is even more critical for system-relevant companies to have a functioning, certified SAP backup.