In our previous article, we analyzed different SAP implementation strategies, what’s best for your business, what not, and more. The next crucial step to a successful SAP migration is data archiving. One cannot possibly move the overwhelming volume of data highly volatile in nature from on-prem to cloud database without causing downtimes during the migration process.
Why do I need to archive my SAP data?
That’s a question resonating with many business IT leaders as they prepare for the migration. For most of them, SAP stores some of the most critical workloads, central to key processes, departments, and roles. Hence, to ensure safety, security, availability, and performance of these workloads, businesses need the right storage infrastructure along with reliable IT support. While SAP-certified storage infrastructure meets both the needs, it makes the infrastructure costly and complex to manage and run. As the business grows, so does the data, outgrowing the storage resource, causing operation bottlenecks.
Now, there’s a high possibility that a huge chunk of this ever-increasing data is sitting idle and eating your storage space. You may or may not need this data after migrating to the new environment of S/4HANA. What to do with this huge volume of data? Neither can you wipe them off from your system, nor can you keep spending money on storage. Enters data archiving into the picture!
As the name suggests, data archiving is the process of cleaning up and archiving a huge volume of data in order to optimize storage space, improve system performance, and reduce response time.
There are two ways to go about it. First, as we just discussed above, using a SAP-certified storage option to store the not-so-critical data. This process is expensive and makes data difficult to scale. The other option is to archive the data using optical storage. This option demands an off-site facility and can be extremely time consuming to recover and restore the data when needed. As you can see, none of the options looks perfect.
There's a third way or the cloud way — using an AWS connector for SAP to store the inactive data on the cloud. The benefit? Well, it takes away the burden of on-prem data management, eliminates the need for an off-site facility, and significantly reduces the cost of storing archived data.
The Linke AWS Connector for SAP
Linke’s AWS Connector for SAP is an add-on that essentially helps in integrating SAP workloads to AWS, Amazon S3 to be precise. Whether on-prem or cloud, Linke AWS Connector supports every SAP system without provisioning any additional hardware. Completely written in ABAP, it ensures secure and streamlined data transfer and storage from SAP to Amazon S3. Benefits?
1. Linke AWS Connector improves SAP storage
Source: Linkeit
2. Enables linking archiving objects to a defined bucket.
Source: SAP Blogs
3. Assists in transaction DMS – by linking material document and displaying the attachments in MIGO.
Source: SAP Blogs
Leverage Amazon Glacier to drive further cost-efficiency
If you wish to save more on storage, consider leveraging Amazon Glacier, a long-term, highly secure storage solution for archiving your inactive business data. Once you store your SAP data in Amazon S3, you can create a customized lifecycle rule for transitioning data to Amazon Glacier after a certain period of time. By this way, you can store data for a meagre $0.004/GB/month. Besides an inexpensive archiving option, Amazon Glacier also comes with its comprehensive security and compliance capabilities along with flexible data retrieval options.
Roadmap to an Effective SAP Data Archiving Strategy
Archiving gigantic volumes of on-premises operational and financial data to S/4HANA is easier said than done. Reason why you would need an effective data archiving or data management strategy before you start the migration process. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to achieve success in archiving SAP data-
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That’s all for today. Stay tuned to the next blog in this series.
In case you want further assistance with any specific aspect of SAP migration, reach out to our SAP experts right away!
