Anatomy of a Recovery: What We Learned from a Real-World Cloud Outage

The Incident: When Cloud Promises Fall Short

The incident began during a routine weekend maintenance window. Our team was coordinating a quarterly SAP support pack upgrade on a critical business unit hosted on a hyperscaler cloud platform. The landscape was fully virtualized—our production and DR were both in separate regions of the same cloud provider.

Around 3 a.m., alerts started firing.

Decision Time: Triggering the DR Plan

Despite being in the cloud, we had invested in a robust disaster recovery architecture. Our DR region had up-to-date asynchronous replication configured using HANA system replication for SAP databases and file-level sync for other artifacts.

Within 30 minutes of realizing the outage would not resolve quickly, we initiated the DR failover.

Post-Incident Learnings

After successful failover and restoration of critical services within 2.5 hours, we held a detailed post-mortem. Here’s what emerged:

1. Cloud doesn’t equal resilience by default.
2. Failover isn’t the end—failback is just as critical.
3. Chaos engineering for DR Is a must.
4. Rethinking RTO/RPO assumptions.

The Human Factor

One of the most revealing takeaways? The human side of recovery.

• Calm leadership under stress matters.
• Stakeholder transparency builds trust.

Conclusion: Real Resilience Requires More Than Tools

This incident reinforced a key truth: resilience isn’t a checkbox, a cloud region, or a backup copy. It’s a mindset, a practice, and a leadership responsibility.

If you’re designing your DR plan today, here’s my advice: Don’t just plan for recovery—plan to lead during chaos.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Puneet Khatri

Puneet Khatri is a seasoned SAP technology leader with more than 17 years of experience in architecting, managing, and securing complex enterprise SAP landscapes. Currently serving as a head of service, he specializes in disaster recovery planning, high availability, and hybrid cloud strategies for mission-critical systems. Khatri has led global SAP resilience programs across industries, with a focus on AWS and Azure-based architectures. He is passionate about aligning IT resilience with business continuity and has authored multiple thought leadership pieces on AI, cloud transformation, and predictive SAP operations. Khatri actively contributes to the SAP and business continuity communities and is committed to enabling enterprises to build future-proof, intelligent infrastructure.