The value of data archiving

The cost of growing data

Together with the natural growth of your business, the number of system users and the amount of data is bound to increase. This can also be due to database expansion when new functionalities are introduced when mergers or acquisitions take place, or when you upgrade to newer system versions. Additional hardware is often required to store these data and when you make backups of them which would result in higher cost of maintenance. A study estimated that poor data cleansing practices will create $890 billion worth of avoidable management and storage costs worldwide by 2020.

A second consequence is that; the more data in your tables, the slower the processes will be. An increasing number of items in the system will be needed to be taken into account when executing transactions. An example of this is when executing queries: the speed is determined by the tables underneath and the amount of data in them. Rapid information retrieval is essential to during this time of digital transformation. To personalise the customer experience, that means having immediate access to all data on each customer. Outdated or irrelevant information mixed in with operational data slows down this process and creates the potential for confusion and errors.

How data archiving helps

Data archiving removes unnecessary data from your system. This can be data that are no longer required, but that is still useful now and then. Data archiving removes the data from the active system, thus speeding up response times and enabling swifter processing times. Your system will transform into a much more productive production environment.

A second benefit is that less space is needed to store the data. The size of archived files will be smaller than the original ones, where copies of the system size will be smaller as well. This will make restoring backups take up a considerably lesser amount of time.

Lastly, archived records will have additional layers of security. Data stored in the archive servers have limited accessibility, where only authorised users can access via specific connected applications.

Moving to SAP S/4HANA

SAP has announced that it will stop providing support to its legacy system from 2027 onwards and many organisations saw the need to migrate their database to SAP S/4HANA. In this instance, it is recommended that data archiving is performed to reduce database size before migrating or converting to SAP S/4HANA to reduce the time and complexity of the project.

Data archiving solutions

With OpenText, it allows you to store, manage, and retrieve SAP and non-SAP documents across SAP modules. It improves SAP system performance, response time and system availability while reducing total cost of ownership in the long run. Other benefits include:

• Permanently decommission legacy systems with confidence
• Speed consolidations, upgrades, and migrations
• Reduce your risk by improving compliance processes