ImpactEPM Recovery

Recovery Overview Immediate Recovery Active Parallel EPM Backup History Project Use Case Back Story

Recovery Overview

Our Data Recovery gives you peace of mind that your data will be secure and easy to recover. Immediate recovery can even be initiated by a power user from a menu within the application for a specific date and, not requiring IT admin involvement.

Being able to realise a signed off reconciled data point at any time gives you the protection from erroneous manual inputs, or problematic data feeds that may not surface for some time. The short video demonstrates how simple it is to get the data back.

How to recover data video

View of Online backups

Power users as demonstrated in the video have a menu option to list all the online backups (see right image).

Data recovery and security is not part of the Oracle SaaS offer, customers are obliged to look after it themselves. Impact EPM Recovery automates the availability of secure data to the power users on-line and off site. Developers can also benefit from the daily online artefact backup.

The solution is available to all Oracle EPM customers including Planning and FCCS. It can be implemented immediately to address any urgent governance and compliance with backup strategy.

This service has evolved through multiple EPM projects requiring backup and recovery and is designed so that there is no up front development required, realising an ongoing saving from reduced internal IT support, plus new features are in the pipeline to be included with the core service.

Immediate Recovery

Online recovery for FP&A users without support team intervention is available using a menu.
The reduced dependency on IT Admin lowers thier burden and therefore cost to their mantime profile.
Project development assets are secured daily, and accessable to the development team for roll back to earlier code versions.

Instant Backup Access

The backup of data to the same instance enables Power Users to initiate a data recovery without the intervention of IT support with Administrator Privileges. A 10 day cycle of files is kept available in the instance, older files can be recovered from the Off Site server.

One of the key features of the ImpactEPM Recovery is that the data of an individual database in an application can be restored, rather than having to restore the whole application. So if you need to recover an earlier days data set immediately due to some data anomaly, this can be done either into TEST for comparison or PROD for resolution.

Artefact (Meta Data) backups are seperate to data, these are very small in terms of storage and easier to manage without the data bulking them up.

For Business Power Users

Directly within the application the power User can initiate the recovery from a menu, the EPM process sets up the data load jobs ready for use.

Recovery Menu

From the iEPM Task List, select Import and then select the data to import for the model to be recovered.

List of Export Files

For Administrators

Data will be stored around a 10 day cycle in the inbox/outbox explorer found in “Overview”

File Explorer

Service Jobs Created

Import of the data is also possible by a Service Administrator using the data import jobs that the service creates

Active Parallel EPM

Synchronize Data

If the main system is unavailable, iEPM Recoery will provide an immediate alternative in an different data centre.

Two Live Instances

Set up of Disaster Recovery model in remote data centre from the daily backups.

During a project, to easily compare changes made in TEST with the current PROD based on the same data set, iEPM Recovery copies and uploads the data from PROD to TEST every night.

In both Production and Test environments the metadata, calculations and other artefacts are backed up.

Synchronise Test

Synchronising will simplify the reconciliation process of new developments to the Production environment.

Encryption in Transit

Communications between ImpactEPM server and EPM instances uses HTTPS, the default that is used by EPM Automate and all user connections to EPM.

Encryption at Rest

“If your organization's policy allows you to encrypt content at rest with an Azure-managed key, then no action is needed - the content is encrypted by default. For managed disks, the content inside storage is encrypted by default with Server-side encryption with platform-managed key. The key is managed by the Azure Storage service.”

FAQ - Azure Disk Encryption for Windows VMs - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Learn

Backup History

Oracle Snapshots become unsupported after one full update cycle (about 6 weeks). ImpactEPM recovery will remain valid. It uses a logical backup like the Artefact Snapshot, but it differs in approach in that it separates programs from data. This enables the additional benefits:-

- Enabling full application restore to different instances, or update of individual components.
- Data can be restored without having to recreate the whole instance.
- Data and Dimensions can be synchronised from the Production to the Test environment.

Retain Old Backups Off Site

1 - By keeping data backups online, this enables power users to invoke a restore of data to a known point in time

2 - Porting copies of the data and artefacts to a second data centre enables Disaster Recovery to be covered.

3 - Offsite storage for longer retention of archives.

With the second SaaS datacentre, here the main models are in London and the secondary is Cardiff, this backup process will copy data and artefacts there and load them overnight to form part of an Enterprise wide DR solution.

,If the second datacentre instance was in use for another Business Process, the backups would only be copied and not restored to the instance.

Due to the nature of the data export, it is much smaller than the default Artefact Snapshot, reducing significantly any likelihood that the Oracle data limits will be exceeded. The Oracle snapshots can be very large, easily exceeding 150Gb, giving rise to the posibility of too big to be stored on the second data centre instance

EPM Cloud Backups for OCI Gen 2 (oracle.com)

Project Use Case

Project Use Cases

Adopting New Chart of Accounts

Issue

When an organisation takes on a new chart of accounts, the export can be leveraged to simplfy the process of moving data.

Solution

For a one to one migration then the use of a Legacy Alias Table for the old name, and alias for the new name will alow the import of the data export that has the Legacy codes.
For many to one:
- In ASO use power shell script to parse the data file replacing legacy codes with the required end legacy code, then accumulating on load.
- In BSO put the legacy members into a "ToDelete" node in the hierarchy and then write a calculation script to accumulate into the new target.

Change Year End

Issue

Change business year end due to merger or acquisition where, for example months move from P01 Jan to P12 Dec into P01 Apr to P12 Mar

Solution

To do the Period Remapping:

-Give the current periods a new unique name

-Set up an alias table with the old code in it's new period, e.g. "Legacy Alias" for Apr will be "P01".

-Reload Export

Security of Development Assets

In both prod and test environments the meta data, calculations and other artefacts are backed up.

Securing the development assets for project work keeping recovery points for developers to revert to previous versions of code.

Source Safe Snapshot

All the artefacts are stored in the “Migration” utility in EPM. It will cycle around an optional 10 days copies of the artefacts.

Each snapshot contains all the Artefacts for the environment.

Back Story

Why Recovery

Innovation driven by necessity

The use case started on a programme with a major Whisky producer, the situation the project encountered was the need to get to a restore point, but not really knowing which day to recover from. Valuable time was spent in trial and error to identify the correct backup to get to a known reconciled point in the budget lifecycle.

Having this solution it would have taken minutes to see each restore point rather than the hours it did take, thus it would've had the budget process back on track the same morning rather than the next day.

How it would have helped in a practical sense is that copies of the Production back up data are stored on the PROD system and also the TEST system, facilitating immediate restore of the data only for the validate of the budget.

With this, on a later project at an insurance firm there was a requirement as part of the project to create from scratch a system to backup four environments (DEV, TEST, PREPROD, PROD). Additionally it had to move the backups between the environments, and then set up a process for updating artefacts into the production environment as part of the change control process.

Another project that would have benefit from this in a very different way. A financial services company that had been acquired were changing their year end date. Trying to reconcile the TEST environment to the PRODUCTION environment which updated every day, a considerable amount of time was spent extracting data, loading to TEST and reconciling. The automation from Impact EPM Recovery would have made this an automated quick and reliable process, cutting a lot of manual setup work.