For the world's leading enterprises, SAP HANA isn't just another database—it's the digital core of the business. It's the engine that unifies real-time transactions with powerful analytics, driving everything from real-time financial closes to resilient, intelligent supply chains.
SAP is deeply integrated into mission-critical operations. So any disruption—whether from an operational failure or a malicious attack—is not just an IT problem. It's a direct threat to business continuity, customer trust, and even the company's existence.
This problem is exacerbated as organizations are increasingly adopting SAP HANA databases in the cloud. This strategic shift is propelled by the immense promise of cloud agility and scale, which allows businesses to shed the cost and complexity of maintaining vast on-premises infrastructure. The trend is further amplified by SAP's end-of-maintenance deadlines for legacy on-premise platforms rapidly approaching in 2025 and 2027, making a move to a modern cloud architecture an unavoidable step for many.
However, this critical migration to the cloud introduces a new set of challenges that can leave an organization's most valuable data dangerously exposed.
The Hidden Risks of Protecting SAP Data in the Cloud
Moving your digital core to the cloud is not a simple task. The cloud, for all its benefits, brings its own complexities and risks. Especially for a sophisticated platform like SAP HANA. These include:
Inherent Cloud Complexity: The public cloud operates on a shared responsibility model, where the cloud provider secures the infrastructure and the customer remains responsible for securing the data inside the cloud. At the same time, the distributed nature of public cloud creates a complex operational environment where visibility is fragmented across different services, regions, and subscriptions, leading to potential protection gaps.
Siloed Operations and Knowledge Gaps: Protecting SAP HANA requires deep, specialized knowledge. Cloud teams, while experts in cloud infrastructure, often lack the specific SAP Basis administration skills needed for proper data protection. This leads to operational silos where dedicated SAP admins are forced to manage protection manually, disconnected from the broader cloud security strategy.
Slow, Manual, and Brittle Backups: In these siloed environments, protection often relies on manual processes and custom scripts. This approach is not only inefficient and slow, but also inherently fragile. A single error in a script or a missed manual job can lead to inconsistent protection, leaving critical data without a valid recovery point.
The Challenge of Scale: Modern SAP HANA deployments are massive and continue to grow. Traditional protection methods simply cannot keep up with the scale of multi-terabyte databases. This results in delayed backup schedules, and an ever-increasingly complex operational burden.
An Evolving and Hostile Threat Landscape: The cyber threat to SAP systems is escalating, with nearly a quarter of organizations attacked last year. A single vulnerability, like the recent code injection flaw (CVE-2025-42957), is all an attacker needs for a full system takeover. From there, the objective is simple: hunt down and destroy backups to prevent recovery, turning a system breach into a full-blown business catastrophe.
The Solution: Cloud-Native Cyber Resilience for SAP HANA
To address these challenges, organizations need a modern data protection platform that is purpose-built for the cloud but unifies protection across their entire estate. Rubrik provides an SAP-certified solution to simplify protection of your SAP HANA databases running on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as your on-premises deployments, all from one unified platform.
Here’s how Rubrik addresses the key pain points:
Automated and Unified Data Protection: Rubrik replaces manual complexity with a single SLA policy engine. You simply define your protection policies and Rubrik automates the discovery and protection of your SAP HANA databases. This ensures consistent, gap-less coverage and empowers both SAP and cloud teams with a centralized view of backup activities and compliance reporting.
Modern, Efficient Backup and Recovery: Rubrik leverages target-side deduplication and compression to drastically reduce your cloud storage footprint and lower the total cost of ownership. When it comes to recovery, you have the flexibility to restore entire databases or individual tenants to any specific point in time with just a few clicks.
Cyber-Resilient by Design: Rubrik’s Zero Trust architecture makes your backups immutable and logically air-gapped from the production network. This means they cannot be discovered, encrypted, or deleted by attackers, ensuring you have a clean, trustworthy copy of your data for rapid recovery from a ransomware attack.
Seamless, Certified Integration: Rubrik’s SAP-certified integration with the SAP HANA Backint interface means minimal change management for your database administrators. They can continue using the native tools they know and trust, like SAP HANA Studio and Cockpit, to perform on-demand backups and restores, all while the underlying data is secured by Rubrik.
Bridging the Silos: While Basis admins maintain their familiar workflows, Rubrik provides the broader cloud and IT teams with the centralized visibility and standardized data protection they need. This breaks down operational silos, ensuring that the company's most critical data asset is protected under a unified, enterprise-grade security strategy.
Ready to Enhance Your Cyber Resilience for SAP HANA in the Cloud?
Your SAP data is the lifeblood of your organization. As you move it to the cloud, its protection cannot be an afterthought. With Rubrik, you can embrace a modern, cyber-resilient approach with an SAP-certified solution that ensures your digital core is secure, compliant, and rapidly recoverable.
Our solution delivers unified, automated, and flexible backup and recovery at scale, all while maintaining workflow continuity for your Basis administrators through native SAP integrations. This eliminates operational complexity so you can focus on what matters most: keeping your business running smoothly.
Learn how to build a cyber-resilient foundation for your SAP HANA in the cloud with Rubrik: