Data, data everywhere … but how can you manage it?
Over the years, every SAP system begins to accumulate a large amount of data, and we all know that data is the life blood of a business. However, the staggering growth of data in today’s complex system environments makes it imperative to develop a strong data management strategy to control costs and reduce risk.
The tools for managing and archiving data have been around for a long time, but lack of a formal data retention policy and/or lack of the required infrastructure to support archived data are often the primary stumbling blocks for managing data throughout its lifecycle.
The other stumbling block is just knowing what is out there in your systems. Where are your biggest pain points? Do you have a quarter-end report that is taking too long to run? Is that backup that used to take 8 hours now running for 13 hours? When you take a hard look, you may also find some errors or omissions in business processes that have been overlooked – for example, an internal data aggregation set up long ago, with reports and jobs running that no one understands, and your data tables just keep growing.
The pain points associated with lack of sufficient archiving are almost self-evident. Uncontrolled database growth, slow-running reports and backups, long runtimes for audits and period-end closing, along with unpredictable runtimes for transformation services like support packs and upgrades. If you don’t have the time or space to create a sandbox to apply support packs, what do you do? You wait, and the next thing you know, years have gone by and you are far behind.
Sound familiar?
Benefits of Archiving Your Data
As your database grows, it’s more important than ever to have a robust data management strategy. By archiving the right data, your business can benefit in the following ways:
- Improved ERP System with potential reduction in hosting costs, improved performance and predictable system growth.
- Focus on TCO and Compliance by reducing total cost of ownership as system data is curated and data volume growth is kept under control. Old or irrelevant data is archived or deleted in accordance with the data retention policy, and compliance risks are mitigated, since data is only removed based on rules and data management policies.
- Data Quality and Content Management is assured through the information lifecycle management/data governance plan, and your business will have a strategy for data prevention or avoidance, data aggregation/summation, and data archiving and retention. In addition, new data standards will lead to quality data for production activities and reporting, as well as support for AI and machine learning (quality in = quality out).
Archiving Services Can Help
NTT DATA Business Solutions offers an Archiving Service designed to provide your business with insight into the current data environment along with options for archiving and purging of data for more efficient operations. It starts with an archiving workshop to assess your current environment. Common business objectives include:
- Reduce Overall Database Size: potential hosting and cost savings; less data in reports and transactions
- Improve System Performance: improve run times on background jobs; improve transaction code execution times; improve time required for system backups/client copies
- Remove Obsolete/Unnecessary/Incorrect data in system: in preparation for upgrade to SAP S/4HANA, or removal of inactive company code or plant or unnecessary merger data
- Ensure compliance with legal requirements for data retention and storage
Deliverables from the workshop include a summary of findings, archiving recommendations and estimate, and recommended next steps.
If you’d like to learn more about our Archiving Services solution, download our solution brief.
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