20.10 Recovery, Backup & Business Continuity
Do not design recovery around a vague statement such as "the cloud service is backed up." Design recovery around business objectives.
Four questions
- What must be recovered?
- How much data can be lost?
- How quickly must service return?
- How will correctness be proven?
RPO
Recovery Point Objective defines acceptable data loss.
RTO
Recovery Time Objective defines acceptable restoration time.
Recovery layers
- Metadata — recreate or redeploy definitions.
- Configuration — restore environment-specific settings.
- Pipelines — restart or backfill failed processing.
- Data — recover or reload according to the authoritative source.
- Consumption — validate downstream contracts.
BCP architecture
Primary tenant -> monitored source systems -> controlled recovery procedure -> alternate operating path
The exact recovery architecture depends on SAP service capabilities, contractual service levels and enterprise continuity requirements. Do not promise a tenant-level backup mechanism that the product documentation does not provide.
Disaster recovery test
A DR plan is incomplete until tested.
Measure:
- time to restore
- data completeness
- security correctness
- consumer availability
- unresolved manual steps
Architect principle
If recovery cannot be demonstrated, it is only a document.