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

This experience report examines a disaster-recovery event triggered during a routine weekend maintenance window on a business-critical SAP landscape hosted on a single hyperscaler cloud platform. It describes the decision to invoke failover, the recovery of critical services within two and a half hours, and the structured post-mortem that followed. The report draws out lessons that recur across cloud-hosted SAP estates, that cloud does not equal resilience by default, that failback deserves as much rigour as failover, that chaos engineering belongs in DR practice, and that recovery-objective assumptions must be revisited, and closes by arguing that real resilience is a leadership discipline rather than a tooling outcome.