Safely and efficiently secured

Business-critical SAP data requires a comprehensive business continuity plan based on Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), as well as the needs and policies of the business. The backup solution would need to be SAP-certified and cover the applications, databases, operating systems, and virtualization platforms in use so that everything can be backed up with a single solution. This is an important part of a solid business continuity plan. In the event of a disaster, the solution ensures that all data and information in a user environment is fully recovered, ideally on-premises as well as in the cloud, and for virtualized and physical environments.

Legal requirements

Compliance with legal requirements such as DSGVO in heterogeneous IT environments must be taken into account. There are many technological approaches that contribute to compliance with legal requirements, such as encryption of backups on backup media (tape, DataStore, dedup), of the data stream, of communication, an external password for restores according to the dual control principle, media disruption (support of offline and WORM media), backup of data to different levels (for example, at the hypervisor and application level), cross-site data backup, automatic migration or copying of backup data to different backup media, network security, planned and automatic restore on stand-by systems (verification of backups - can also be used for audits or documented) and disaster recovery tests during operation including reporting for physical and virtual environments. 

For increased backup efficiency, i.e. significant backup data reduction, there are global dedup software solutions that also use encryption for deduplication and replication, including an effective algorithm for high dedup rates, high performance by means of parallel threads and complete inline-in-memory without postprocessing. After splitting the data stream into blocks and compressing each block, each individual block can be encrypted by an arbitrarily definable key. To restore the data, the key can be stored in the database of the backup server or the data owner must authorize a restore with his personal key.

This encryption guarantees BSI compliance. Global software deduplication takes full effect across backup, replication and client side. Software dedup can almost match the performance of a native DataStore for backup, restore and migration, according to benchmarks to date. If required, dedup can also be used directly in the cloud (direct-to-S3) without the detour via local storage for cost- and performance-optimized operation in AWS or for the use of SDS storage. 

Dedup in practice

One example of a company that successfully uses dedup for backup is the managed service provider Collogia IT Services in the SAP environment, which can look back on a broad and well-known clientele. It uses an SAP-certified backup solution for the Hana environment, Red Hat virtualization and Windows servers, which also includes deduplication. The backup covers the entire IT infrastructure, which means simplified management, central monitoring of the backups and the backup environment, such as the occupancy of the data areas, so that the backup of the customer's data is always kept in view and a data recovery can be initiated in the shortest possible time.