Subject: SAP-CPI (Cloud Platform Integration)
Category: SAP Integration / SAP Cloud Platform
In today’s digital era, business continuity is paramount. Organizations rely heavily on integration platforms like SAP Cloud Platform Integration (SAP CPI) to ensure seamless data exchange between SAP and non-SAP systems. Any disruption in SAP CPI services can lead to critical business impacts, including halted operations, data loss, and compliance risks. Thus, implementing a robust Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy for SAP CPI is essential to guarantee system resilience and minimize downtime during unforeseen events.
This article provides an overview of disaster recovery concepts in SAP CPI, discusses best practices, and outlines steps to implement an effective DR approach for your integration environment.
¶ Understanding Disaster Recovery in SAP CPI
Disaster Recovery refers to the set of policies, tools, and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster. In SAP CPI, DR focuses on ensuring that integration flows, message data, and configurations remain available or can be quickly restored after failures such as data center outages, system crashes, or cyberattacks.
SAP CPI is hosted on SAP’s cloud infrastructure, typically running on multiple geographically distributed data centers. This inherently provides a degree of redundancy and failover capability. However, while SAP handles infrastructure resilience, customers must plan for application-level disaster recovery.
¶ 2. Data Persistence and Backup
Message data, integration flow configurations, security artifacts (e.g., certificates, credentials), and logs need to be protected and backed up regularly.
Define Recovery Time Objective (RTO) — the maximum acceptable downtime, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) — the maximum acceptable data loss in terms of time, to guide your DR planning.
- Export integration packages (iFlows, mappings, scripts) regularly to external repositories such as Git or SAP Transport Management System.
- Use SAP CPI’s Content Export feature to download and store versions of integration artifacts.
- Implement version control for traceability and rollback capabilities.
- Since SAP CPI manages message storage internally, leverage Message Processing Logs and Message Content APIs to extract and archive critical message data externally.
- Configure scheduled extraction flows to export message payloads and logs to durable storage solutions (e.g., SAP HANA, AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage).
- Backup all security artifacts such as certificates, keystores, OAuth credentials, and API keys.
- Store these securely in vaults or credential management systems to restore during failover.
¶ 4. Failover and Multi-Region Deployment
- Engage with SAP or your cloud provider to understand options for multi-region deployment or failover capabilities.
- Some enterprises may deploy parallel CPI tenants in different regions, with active-active or active-passive setups.
- Establish RTO and RPO targets.
- Identify critical integration flows and data that must be recovered.
¶ Step 2: Backup Integration Content and Security Artifacts
- Schedule regular exports of integration packages.
- Backup security credentials and certificates.
- Build scheduled iFlows that retrieve message logs and payloads via CPI APIs.
- Store extracted data securely for audit and recovery purposes.
¶ Step 4: Test Backup and Restore Procedures
- Periodically validate the ability to restore integration content and message data.
- Simulate failover scenarios to ensure process effectiveness.
¶ Step 5: Collaborate with SAP Support and Cloud Providers
- Understand SAP’s SLAs and disaster recovery support.
- Consider cloud-region redundancy options for critical deployments.
- Automate Backups: Use scheduled automation to reduce human error and ensure consistency.
- Maintain Version Control: Store all integration artifacts in a version-controlled system like Git.
- Secure Backup Storage: Encrypt backup data and restrict access to authorized personnel.
- Document DR Plans: Keep comprehensive and up-to-date disaster recovery documentation.
- Regular DR Drills: Conduct disaster recovery simulations to improve preparedness.
- Monitor Integration Health: Use CPI monitoring tools and alerting to detect issues early.
¶ Challenges and Considerations
- Cloud Platform Dependency: Customers rely on SAP’s infrastructure resilience but must proactively manage application-level DR.
- Data Volume: Large message volumes require scalable and efficient archival solutions.
- Complex Integration Landscapes: Diverse integration scenarios may complicate DR planning.
- Costs: Multi-region deployments and extensive backups may increase operational expenses.
While SAP CPI benefits from SAP’s robust cloud infrastructure, implementing a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy is crucial to ensure business continuity at the application and integration level. By proactively backing up integration content, message data, and security artifacts, and regularly testing recovery processes, organizations can safeguard against disruptions and minimize downtime in critical integration workflows.
Disaster recovery in SAP CPI is a shared responsibility — combining SAP’s cloud resilience with customer-driven backup, archiving, and failover planning to create a resilient integration environment.
Keywords: SAP CPI, Disaster Recovery, Backup, Business Continuity, Integration Flows, Message Archiving, Cloud Platform Integration, SAP BTP, DR Strategy