Rising Profile Drives New Focus for Enterprise Disaster Recovery for Cloud Based Hosting Providers
Extreme disruption is the new normal for CIOs. Over the past two years, senior technology executives have managed the sudden rise of a hyper-distributed workforce, and navigated the emergence of increasingly complicated enterprise computing environments that integrate a complex array of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructures.
As we move toward the middle of an eventful decade, senior technology executives must prepare contingencies for an uncertain global economy. Amid all this change and confusion, however, one thing is certain: Success will belong to organizations with the agility and adaptability to adjust to changing market forces, and the resilience to recover from unexpected but meaningful disruptions.
In this context, business and technology leaders must look at the role hybrid-cloud environments will play in business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR).
For SAP customers, the year 2027 presents a particular incentive to evaluate the state of enterprise resilience as organizations both migrate major workloads to SAP HANA in-memory databases and embrace being SAP S/4HANA enterprise cloud-native.
The promise of cloud–that it is cost-effective, scalable, flexible, and accessible–has long been touted. Indeed, many of cloud’s benefits have come true. Getting there, though, has not always been easy, especially when it comes to achieving the expected economic benefits.
As the market matures, a corresponding rise in experience and expertise around cloud has emerged to accelerate interest and implementation.
Gartner forecasts that by 2025 worldwide end-user spending on public cloud will increase to nearly $725 billion, a 47% jump from $491 billion in 2022. According to the analysts, a growing number of enterprises see cloud as a “highly strategic platform for digital transformation,” and their choice of cloud providers as critical elements to achieving “specific, desired business and technology outcomes.”
As cloud acceptance matures, a critical question arises.
Are Disaster Recovery Strategies Cloud-Ready?
Studies indicate that enterprises’ disaster recovery may need work to be strong enough for multi-cloud deployments. While half of businesses are confident in their business continuity plans, 77% reported recovery issues during their last declared disaster, according to Gartner research.
For enterprises that are accelerating public cloud adoption and migrating mission-critical business applications (such as SAP) to multi-cloud environments, now is the time to reimagine disaster recovery strategies.
Key Opportunities with Enterprise Disaster Recovery for Cloud Based Hosting Providers
Establish an Integrated Strategy that Combines Out-of-the-Box, SAP-Integrated Clusters
The impact of SAP system downtime, even when temporary, can be severe. It can interrupt production and supply chains, causing lost sales, lost data, payroll delays, and regulatory fines. Mere minutes can cost tens of thousands of dollars. That is why It is not ideal to rely only on the protections built into SAP.
While time-consuming, it is important to make the effort to develop a strategy that uses cluster software to replicate workloads on a primary server across one or more secondary servers. Cluster software can also track SAP application health and move an operation to a secondary server in the cluster if it detects a failure. This enhances redundancy and prevents downtime and data loss.
About Sios Technology Corp.
SIOS Technology Corp. has more than 20 years of experience providing customers with the most reliable, comprehensive high availability and disaster recovery solutions. The company has more than 80,000 licenses installed globally, protecting applications for companies in a broad range of industries.
SIOS Technology Corporation’s LifeKeeper software provides automated high availability and DR protection for SAP HANA enterprise cloud databases. It supports the extension of traditional two-node failover clusters to include additional nodes and locations without complex scripting and cumbersome administrative tasks.
LifeKeeper supports synchronous or asynchronous block-level replication from the primary HANA node for up to three secondary nodes using block-level HANA System Replication (HSR). LifeKeeper automatically orchestrates failover and manages replication to disaster recovery sites for hands-free recovery from faults, failures, and disasters.
Look for Cluster Software with Multitarget Features
SAP HANA clusters are complex. Ensuring that all HANA nodes in the cluster are stable and dependable is critical in the event of a failover. Lifekeeper's multi target system replication feature provides the next level of traditional two-node clusters. If there is a disaster, the primary node can failover to a secondary and even tertiary target node located in a different cloud or on-prem disaster recovery location.
LifeKeeper’s multi target feature enhances this protection by enabling up to four-node HANA multitarget configurations.
If the solution detects an availability issue, it automatically orchestrates an application failover from the primary node to one of the secondary nodes. It can switch disaster recovery replication between two secondary nodes, maintaining disaster recovery protection. When normal operations are reestablished, LifeKeeper automatically restores original replication settings with a single click.
Understand Requirements for SAP in AWS and Microsoft Azure
With either AWS or Microsoft Azure, it is essential to understand how high availability and business continuity for SAP applications are ensured. Because cloud service providers (CSPs) tend to focus on infrastructure, they generally do not provide high service level availability at the application and data layers. To secure 99.99% availability, it is important to ensure that AWS- and Microsoft Azure-certified measures and policies are in place for:
• High availability failover clustering,
• Continuous application monitoring,
• Data replication, and
• Configurable recovery.
SIOS DataKeeper, for both AWS and Microsoft Azure, is a high availability and disaster recovery solution that combines fully automated, application-centric clustering and efficient data replication without costly shared storage requirements.
When DataKeeper is added to a Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) environment, it synchronizes local storage using highly efficient block-level replication, making it appear to WSFC as traditional shared storage. With DataKeeper, organizations can use WSFC in the cloud without the cost and complexity of storage area networks (SANs) or other shared storage arrangements.
Conclusion
Enterprises are aware of the importance of disaster recovery in their operations. But they will have to move beyond conventional BC/DR strategies to ensure resilience in today’s hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure environment.
Indeed, a growing consensus is emerging around the notion that BC/DR is a moving target. Infrastructure, application, and data management operations are constantly evolving. The challenge is that whenever significant changes are made to system architectures, critical dependencies are often affected.
That is why business leaders responsible for optimizing enterprise system performance, especially those charged with protecting SAP applications, should review the state of enterprise resilience on an annual—if not twice-yearly—basis.
About ASUG
ASUG is the world’s largest SAP user group. Originally founded by a group of visionary SAP customers in 1991, its mission is to help people and organizations get the most value from their investment in SAP technology. ASUG currently serves thousands of businesses via companywide memberships, connecting more than 130,000 professionals with networking and educational resources to help them master new challenges. Through in person and virtual events, on-demand digital resources, and ongoing advocacy for its membership, ASUG helps SAP customers make more possible.
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