In recent years, the topic of SAP ECC6 (or older) data archiving has become controversial in many companies. After spending thousands of hours in corporate meetings listening to many of these discussions, we offer a few scenarios to try to make this more digestible from a strategy perspective based on what our experts have learned. These scenarios will help with sorting the never-ending debate with different people saying, “what about this” or “what about that.” Those conversations often paralyze the decision-making process and delay problem-solving.
Before discussing internally, we are recommending that you consider the following strategic criteria in order to have an organized and coordinated project plan_
Identify the value of your legacy data. If you have incomplete, poor, or unstructured data that has little value other than “audit or compliance,” then you should adopt a strategy to archive and report. I will explain three strategic options for this in our next blog.
If you value your data and the historical information derived from it, then you need to take a different approach. It does not matter whether your data is structured or unstructured – either way, it is necessary to get it into a data lake, then into a data warehouse to report on it with your visualization tools. This will cost some money, so adequate budgeting for the project is crucial. SAP now provides tools that we can use to extract the data. As an SAP Silver Partner, Aptimized will help your business with options for how to do this on our website.
If you do not have resources, time, or desire to take this on, then the best (but temporary) option is to work with SAP on getting a license to just carry the system in a locked down state. Keep in mind, this will only delay a future archive discussion. The software will eventually go full end of life and the cloud providers will continue patching or releasing security updates that could cause stability issues with the ECC environment on prem or in the cloud, which does not include any on prem issues regarding hardware.
After you are able to determine what position your organization or company is in, the roadmap becomes much easier when deciding how to migrate your legacy SAP ECC6 environment.
Stay tuned for more installments to this process with our weekly updates. Follow us on social media to get notified on the next issue. Contact us to begin your modernization journey today.