Architectural Approaches to Disaster Recovery and High Availability in SAP HANA Cloud

Abstract

The migration of mission-critical enterprise workloads to SAP HANA Cloud necessitates architectures that guarantee business continuity amidst disruptions. Downtime, whether caused by infrastructure failure, cyberattacks, or regional disasters, poses significant operational and financial risks. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of architectural paradigms for disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) in SAP HANA Cloud. We evaluate the trade-offs inherent in active-active, active-passive, and hybrid cloud DR models, considering critical metrics such as Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO), cost, and complexity. Synthesizing these findings, we propose an integrated reference architecture that harmonizes SAP HANA's native replication features with advanced hyperscaler resilience services. A real-world case study implementation on Microsoft Azure demonstrates the practical application of these principles, resulting in an RTO of <10 minutes and an RPO of near-zero while optimizing costs. Our findings indicate that a strategic, automated, and cloud- native approach is essential for building resilient, compliant, and cost-effective SAP HANA Cloud environments, and we offer recommendations for future evolution involving AI-driven orchestration and multi-cloud strategies.