It is important for businesses to recognize SAP Archiving. Product selection in SAP archiving starts with a thorough assessment of what the business already owns and what is required for a successful SAP archiving system.
The Assessment
Product selection begins with this assessment and in majority of the cases the consultant or the vendor partner becomes involved in the process. This is because a big part of the technology is usually under consideration and the IT staff and the management might find it still unfamiliar. In this case it is very crucial that the business employ the services of a professional who has a proven background in SAP archiving- best practices.
SAP Archiving – Best Practices
It is important that the archiving process be planned and practiced on secondary system so that current data is never affected and downtime problems or data loss would not occur. However, this is not the case in most businesses because they lack enough resources and are therefore forced to use live data. This is why having an experienced third party involved will help in the identification of problems before they affect any vital operational elements.
Effective Handling of Transactional Data
SAP system products have allowed an ecosystem of useful products some which were specifically created to archive and protect date. What makes these products unique and valuable to a business is the way in which they handle transactional data which is a vital part of a SAP solution.
Transactional data is usually very complex because it has multiple links all across the data files, indexes and tables and is often arranged in some kind of symbiotic relationship with the other equally important data elements. For example a sales file will be linked to inventory files, customers’ files, invoice files and many data elements. In order for the SAP archiving to become a success all the linked data should be preserved for every transaction. This is a major requirement for any SAP archival solution.
Products and services can be introduced into the markets and this will definitely automate archiving and at the same time enable a recovery environment to allow easy data retrieval. Majority of vendors involved usually require that the purchases of the software and hardware solve their archiving solutions. Most of them also work with more complex technologies like data virtualization or hosted storage. Administrators are advised to practice caution when doing product selection and establish that there are no hidden requirements that cannot be serviceable.
The Ideal SAP Archiving Process
- The active transactional database has to experience improved performance
- There has to be ultimate data protection from loss, unauthorized access or corruption
- Overall storage costs have to be reduce
- All the requirements such as compliance, legislative and corporate should be met
- Automate a large part of the process and reduce the administrative burden
- Allow reporting capabilities and the much needed validation needs
- Archived data should be retrieved with ease
- Successful handling of any application upgrades and changes that are likely to affected the dataset archived
- Lastly, it should automatically retire unneeded data
Meeting the above practices will ensure that successful implementation of SAP data archiving solution has occurred. However, even after meeting the above criteria, regular data validation and testing should be done to establish that the data archiving solution is actually delivering the expected business value. However, transactional data system improvement in terms of performance and reliable archived data storage is always achieved in the end thanks to SAP archiving.