Archiving and SAP Environments: For Business, IT, and Regulatory Requirements

Archiving and SAP® Environments:
For Business, IT, and Regulatory Requirements
A WHITE PAPERArchiving and SAP® Environments: For Business, IT, and Regulatory Requirements
Overview
A recent survey of CIOs found that over 75% want to To help move retention management to the fore, Forrester, an develop an overall information strategy in the next independent research firm, recommends creating a vision statement "focusing on mitigating legal issues and costs through more effective three years, yet over 85% are not close to implementing 1application of retention policies to all organizational information." an enterprise-wide content management strategy. Forrester's example of a preliminary retention management vision Meanwhile, data runs rampant, slows systems, and statement reads, "We aim to mitigate our content-related risks and impacts performance. Hard-copy documents multiply, reduce our eDiscovery costs while considering IT infrastructure 2become damaged, or simply disappear. Nevertheless, concerns and how our lines of business use content."employees, customers, and business partners continue to An archive that seamlessly integrates SAP and non-SAP content demand fast, efficient search and retrieval of information gives employees, customers, and business partners a unified view in many forms from across the organization while of business-critical information that enables them to collaborate regulatory requirements compel information retention and operate more efficiently, take faster action, and make better and lifecycle management. decisions. Using this integrated archive, they are able to view, download, and print documents, reports, and images in any format For organizations with SAP® deployments, some without leaving the SAP environment.information is in the SAP system; other information is in Archiving helps solve vital business, technical, and legal issues for the emails or legacy applications. How can an organization enterprise:using SAP manage the myriad of content needed to run a . Business issues. How do employees, customers, and business successful business? partners access the documents and reports they need? What does that access cost, and how efficient is it? How is information The answer lies in a comprehensive archiving solution shared? How are issues resolved? What is the company's that extends the capability of SAP applications, improves retention policy for storing customer documents? Do quality system performance, functions as a long-term repository certification programs require copies of original, mission-critical for regulatory compliance, and helps achieve the documents and reports? How long is financial data kept? enterprise integration that is the ultimate goal of your How are business practices that require the extended storage SAP implementation. and high-speed retrieval of forms, letters, reports, diagrams, specifications, performance test results, and other unstructured Why Archiving Is Important in SAP Environments documents managed? To answer these questions, an archiving Archiving documents and data is a critical activity for any enterprise. server optimized for the storage and retrieval of unstructured, The archive, as the enabling solution, should be an integral part of diversely formatted data is needed.an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. Yet it is often viewed as a low priority, conjuring up images of dusty tape silos that . Technical issues. As production tables grow larger, the system are seldom accessed. slows down because more resources of every kind-memory, CPU cycles, disk and network, and administration-are needed However, the archive can-and should-be an enhancement and to support them. Archiving data from production database extension of the online production system, allowing production tables is the first step in allowing data deletion and table applications to execute more efficiently and providing real-time reorganization. Regular transactional data archiving, deletion, access to data and documents that no longer need to reside in the and reorganization are essential for optimal system performance.production system.
  
 

 !"" # $%$&&%#. Legal and regulatory issues. Governments and regulatory System Availabilitybodies continually add and upd... [download for more]