Keep your data during SAP S/4HANA migration

What’s your strategy for decommissioning legacy systems and creating cost-effective data storage?

Transformation projects such as S/4HANA migrations, carve-outs, mergers and acquisitions, and system consolidations often involve an enormous amount of data, leaving decision-makers with the dilemma of what to do with the data and documents. Much of this data will be selectively migrated to the new system and remain in use. But what happens to legacy data that isn’t needed in day-to-day business operations? Typically, deletion is not an option – particularly due to retention obligations for tax-relevant data. Information concerning product-related processes or internal company analyses needs to remain available too.

How about a read-only legacy system?

During S/4HANA migrations, experts have to account for linked documents and data from different modules and often different systems. The easy option is to leave the remaining unselected data in the legacy system and set it to read-only mode. The drawback of this approach is that you have to maintain an outdated SAP system for ten years or even more due to retention obligations. This is both complex and expensive. Added to that, the access is time-consuming and only needed in rare cases, for example for operational purposes, tax audits or internal data analyses.

All in all, operating legacy systems in read-only mode is a huge waste of resources.

Software-based, powerful and audit-proof: The right way to archive your data

The SNP approach is software-based, highly efficient and trusted by a wide range of companies of all sizes from various industries. Our solution SNP Outboard Datafridge enables you to store your data in an accessible and cost-effective way. You don’t need any additional infrastructure either, as it’s powered by your new SAP S/4HANA system. All data and documents to be retained are extracted from the legacy system and stored securely and economically in an archive system – either on-premise or in the cloud. You can then access the legacy data via the SAP standard user interface, viewing and using the data and documents at any time both simply and efficiently. Integrated checks ensure that retention periods and data protection regulations are met and that data is deleted consistently and on schedule. Datafridge supports a total data volume of more than 40 terabytes of data and retention periods of over 50 years. The audit-proof approach is also certified by a leading German auditing company.

A recent whitepaper, How to make your move to SAP S/4HANA a success, offers further insights for SAP S/4HANA migrations. It details the best ways to decommission obsolete systems and store relevant data securely and cost-effectively after migrating to SAP S/4HANA.