Runaway data growth poses business risk for SAP users says research

No fewer than 45% of SAP software users admit that their data is growing faster than expected and 69% complain that their main worry about keeping large volumes of data in their SAP database is the time it takes to back up and protect their systems. That's the top line finding of the latest survey by SAP archiving specialist Macro 4. "We've come across organisations whose SAP databases have grown so large that backups take over 15 hours, making them difficult to schedule without disrupting productivity," explains Lynda Kershaw, marketing manager at Macro 4, which says it surveyed 135 SAP users in UK, France and Spain. "More importantly, data restores take much longer than backups – we've spoken to users with large databases who know it would take them several days to get their core business systems up and available again, in the event of failure. The impact on sales and productivity could be catastrophic," she adds. And the reasons: "Some people falsely assume that if they're mirroring their data at a secondary site, they'll always get the system back instantly. But any corruption to data at the main site will just be mirrored to the second location. So on many occasions you're still left with lengthy downtime as you try to restore large volumes of data from backup," insists Kershaw. Macro 4 makes the point that data moved into an SAP archive can be just as accessible as if it were still live within the system: "The archiving process is completely transparent to the end user and most people would notice no difference whether they were calling up something from the archive or from the live environment," says Kershaw.