Data archiving with SAP and UNIORG

Because of the rising tide of documentation, SAP users are confronted with increasing demands on their SAP system and its linked data banks. Without sometimes large investment in additional hardware components, system performance in practice diminishes considerably. This results in generally longer response times as too many data are involved at selection. Moreover, more time is also required for the necessary data bank reorganization and backup runs.

The solution to this problem is SAP data archiving; that is, archiving of those data which no longer need be directly available for business administration purposes, but should not be deleted or eliminated. For an SAP system, the data archiving solution from SAP is the only SAP-verified method to consistently remove data from a system, while providing these for read-back when needed. What's more, this software function is already built into the SAP basic module.

Solution--archiving data with SAP and UNIORG

Requirements for archiving

  1. Legal requirements
    Essentially, the specific guidelines of the local tax administrations must be complied with. From 01.01.02, the "Principles for Data Access and Verifiability of Digital Documents" (or GDPdU) apply for Germany. These establish consistent rules for access to archived and/or stored data and their verifiability for financial authorities in Germany.
  2. Company requirements
    These are primarily requirements from individual departments regarding functionalities of the archive, processing of archived documents or retention periods of archived data.
  3. Technical requirements
    Under this heading we have for example access times to archived data, data security of data media over longer periods or administration of data on external filing systems.

The primary purpose of a data archiving project is thus improved system performance through removal of data no longer necessary to the SAP application from the production system, while still making these available for read-back. However, it is not enough to view data archiving merely from the perspective of administration and system load reduction. Rather, necessary requirements for storage of archived data must also be taken into account, along with their auditing acceptability.

Our approach

At project start, we generate a detailed system analysis for you concerning your data bank and the hardware used up to that point for data storage. The objective of the data bank analysis is to identify those archiving items which seem appropriate for archiving on the basis of information regarding volume and growth of the data bank (storage space allocation of individual tables). Based on the wishes of various specialized departments and legal requirements, the technical demands upon the archive or the filing system are then determined; these could be:

  • correct transfer of data from data bank to archive
  • fast access to archived data
  • possibility of data recovery, visual and content
  • guarantee of long-term data security with regard to the selected storage medium

Before the design goes into operation, it is implemented on your test system and the necessary tests are conducted for the corresponding archiving items.

We'll be glad to support you in implementing your individual archiving project. And we'll be more than happy to lay out the advantages of an archiving project with UNIORG within the framework of a personal presentation. The corresponding success story illustrates implementation of a rather complex project for our customer VEKA AG.