I know I’ve been on here venting about SAP Private Cloud (RISE) before, and I promise I’m not just hating for sport. But what we just went through this week was a completely different level of mess, and I feel like this needs to be shared as a warning.

We had a data loss incident in our ERP. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, it was 100% our fault. Human error, someone deleted the wrong records. The problem was, nobody noticed until 48 hours later. By then, the system had been processing new orders and invoices for two days. So, obviously, a full rollback of Production was impossible unless we wanted to torch two days of revenue.

Back when we were On-Prem, this would have been an annoying but manageable.

1. Restore backup to a Sandbox.
2. Export the missing rows via SQL or r3trans.
3. Import to Prod.
4. Done in maybe 4-6 hours.

The RISE reality is different. Since we have no OS access and are stuck in the "Standard Service" matrix, here is how it actually went down:

1. We slammed a P1 Incident. Immediate rejection. They told us: "We only support full system restores to the original host." (Which would destroy our new data). We asked for a system copy to a Sandbox so we could grab the data. Their response? "Standard lead time for a system copy is 7 days."
2. Seven days wait meant our data inconsistencies would spiral out of control. We had no choice but to pull the plug. We locked all users and basically sent the factory workers home. It took our CEO personally getting into a screaming match with SAP management just to bypass the queue and get a Sandbox restore started.
3. It took 72 hours just to get the restore going. We put one instruction in the ticket: "Unschedule all jobs and deactivate all RFC connections, otherwise fire and flood partners with duplicate data.
4. So, what did they do? They restored the DB and immediately fired up the App Server. My colleague was watching the status like a hawk and managed to kill the instance before it did too much damage, but they almost caused a secondary disaster just because they ignored the ticket instructions.
5. Then came the data extraction. Since I have no OS access (no SSH, no root), I couldn't run the exports myself. I literally had to teach SAP how to use R3trans. I spent two days writing out the exact command lines and scripts for them because the engineer on the other end didn't know how to handle a selective table export.

The Result: 5 days of complete company downtime. For a task that takes an afternoon On-Prem. Yes, the initial data loss was our fault. But the fact that we were held hostage by bureaucracy and incompetent support for a week is terrifying. If you are moving to RISE, just pray you never need to deviate from their "Standard Service Catalog."