SAP RISE promises a streamlined cloud experience, with system copies included as part of its standard service. Yet many customers quickly discover that these inclusions cover only a fraction of what’s needed for a full system refresh. The real work—ensuring configurations, customizations, and post-copy steps are properly executed—still rests heavily on the customer side.
Typical System Refresh Process in SAP RISE
Within SAP RISE, a system refresh follows the same fundamental phases seen in any SAP environment, including preparation, execution, and post-copy activities. However, the way these steps are carried out is shaped by RISE service boundaries outlined in the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services Roles and Responsibilities.
Figure 1: SAP vs Customer Roles and Responsibilities (System Refresh)
Preparation
In the preparation phase, the customer carries most of the responsibility. This includes deciding which parts of the target system must be preserved, such as user master data, roles, IDoc-related tables, functional tables, RFC destinations, STMS configurations, SSO settings, certificates, and transport requests not yet imported into production, while allowing all other data to be overwritten by the source copy. Customers must also coordinate stakeholder communication and freeze windows, perform backups of the target system, and clean up logs or large tables to reduce refresh time and system size.
Since customers do not control the underlying infrastructure, initiating a refresh begins with raising a Service Request (SR) with SAP, which falls under the standard inclusions provided in RISE contracts. Access to client 000 may also be required to configure task list variants in STC01, which in RISE means submitting an additional service request to SAP. SAP, in turn, may request the installation of the PCA-ENT component, enabling Post-Copy Automation (if the customer has a license in their contract).
Execution
The execution phase is primarily an SAP responsibility under RISE. Once the SR is approved, SAP performs the technical refresh tasks, which include running the export task list, restoring the database from the source system, executing the import task list, and reinstating licenses, profiles, and basic system services. SAP adjusts instance parameters and any tasks that may require the system client 000 to execute.
At this point, the system is technically refreshed but not yet operational for business use. The customer’s role during execution is mostly coordination and monitoring, ensuring prerequisites are complete and maintaining communication with SAP while the tasks are carried out.
Post-Copy
After SAP hands over the refreshed system, responsibility shifts almost entirely to the customer. These activities fall under "Excluded Tasks", meaning SAP will not perform them under any RISE service category. Customers must import manually exported tables, re-import pending transport requests, and complete logical system assignments if BDLS requires additional passes. They must reconfigure RFC connections, background jobs, and user authorizations, validate users, roles, batch jobs, and spool requests, and coordinate with functional teams to perform sanity checks. Once validations are complete, customers unlock users and release the system for testing.
Any issues encountered after handover fall under the responsibility of the customer Basis team, unless explicitly contracted under Additional Services. SAP delivers the baseline copy and automation framework as part of RISE standard services. However, troubleshooting, fine-tuning, and functional alignment remain squarely within the customer’s scope to ensure the refreshed system is production-ready and fit for purpose.
The Automation Gap in SAP RISE
While SAP RISE provides the foundational infrastructure and basic system copy capabilities, significant gaps remain in the automation of critical lifecycle activities. These gaps become particularly apparent when organizations need to perform frequent system refreshes, manage multiple environments, or maintain complex customizations across their SAP landscape.
The most significant challenge lies in the post-copy activities that SAP explicitly excludes from RISE services. These tasks, including configuration validation, customization preservation, user management, and system integration testing, often require manual intervention that can take days or weeks to complete. For organizations running development, testing, and training environments that require regular system refreshes, this manual overhead quickly becomes a bottleneck that limits agility and increases operational costs.
Moreover, the coordination required between customer teams and SAP support for each system refresh introduces delays and communication overhead. Organizations must plan refresh activities well in advance, coordinate multiple service requests, and manage dependencies between SAP-controlled and customer-controlled activities. This coordination complexity makes it difficult to achieve the rapid provisioning and scaling that modern businesses require.
Beyond Basic System Copy: The Need for Comprehensive Automation
System refreshes represent just one aspect of the broader SAP lifecycle automation challenge. Organizations need automation capabilities that extend across provisioning new environments, managing ongoing operations, handling compliance requirements, and eventually decommissioning systems when they're no longer needed.
In the provisioning phase, while SAP RISE handles infrastructure deployment, customers still need automation for environment-specific configurations, security settings, integration endpoints, and business data setup. Manual configuration of these elements for each new environment is time-consuming and error-prone, leading to inconsistencies that can cause issues during testing and production deployment.
During ongoing operations, customers need automated capabilities for performance monitoring, patch management, backup validation, user access management, and compliance reporting. SAP RISE provides basic infrastructure monitoring, but customers require deeper insights into application performance, business process health, and integration status across their entire SAP ecosystem.
The decommissioning phase presents its own automation challenges, particularly around data archival, compliance documentation, and resource cleanup. Organizations need systematic approaches to ensure that retired systems are properly archived, audit trails are preserved, and resources are fully reclaimed to avoid ongoing costs.
The Complexity of Managing Hybrid Environments
Modern SAP deployments typically involve multiple environments serving different purposes: development for creating new functionality, testing for validation, training for user education, and production for business operations. Each environment requires different configurations, data sets, and integration patterns, yet they must maintain consistency in core system behavior and security policies.
Managing multiple environments manually becomes exponentially complex as organizations scale their SAP footprint. Each system refresh affects not just the target environment but also dependent systems, integration points, and user access patterns. Coordinating these activities across environments while maintaining system availability and data integrity requires orchestration capabilities that go well beyond basic system copy functionality.
The challenge intensifies when considering the interdependencies between SAP systems and other enterprise applications. Modern business processes often span multiple systems, requiring careful coordination of refresh activities to ensure that integrated processes continue to function correctly after system updates.
Introducing Advanced Solutions for SAP RISE & Hybrid Environment
To address these comprehensive automation needs, organizations require solutions that go beyond the basic capabilities included in SAP RISE. These solutions must provide end-to-end orchestration capabilities while working within the constraints and service boundaries of cloud-hosted SAP environments.
Effective SAP lifecycle automation requires deep integration with SAP's native capabilities, a comprehensive understanding of SAP-specific requirements, and the ability to orchestrate complex workflows across multiple systems and platforms. The solution must also provide the visibility and control that organizations need to maintain compliance, manage risks, and optimize performance across their entire SAP landscape.
IT-Conductor FLUX™: SAP-Post Copy Automation
IT-Conductor FLUX emerges as a comprehensive solution that leverages advanced SAP-native Post Copy Automation (PCA). FLUX runs natively within the SAP GUI, eliminating the need for extensive OS-level access and ensuring full compatibility with RISE deployments.
Since its official launch on September 5, 2025, FLUX has continued to evolve, with ongoing enhancements designed to deliver greater efficiency and reliability for SAP customers. The latest version introduces powerful new capabilities, including cross-platform support for both Linux and Windows-based SAP systems, a configurable export directory, background job execution that enables all package exports and imports to run as SAP background jobs, and direct job log access through the SAP GUI.
Our team has also been working tirelessly to make FLUX easily accessible on SAP Store and AWS Marketplace, simplifying the way customers can try and deploy the solution.
To address the critical pain points SAP customers encounter during system refresh and to demonstrate how the latest features simplify the process, we invite you to join our upcoming webinar on September 30, 2025.
