How Does SAP Retention Mitigate Risks For Business?

SAP's data retention and archiving tools allow enterprises to more effectively manage their data by moving older data into archives. Not only does this result in leaner databases for day-to-day operations, it also helps organizations mitigate risks associated with regulations, system performance and availability, ever-growing IT costs, and legal discovery. Below are a few ways that SAP retention helps to mitigate risks for business.

• SAP retention and data retention and destruction regulations - Perhaps one of the biggest risks facing enterprises is regulatory compliance, or lack thereof. SAP retention helps organizations to comply with all applicable regulations covering data retention as well as data destruction. In addition, data retention can be configured to preserve compliance auditing for legacy and decommissioned systems. Even in the absence of regulations, organizations can establish their own internal data retention and destruction rules to ensure consistency and mitigate risk across the enterprise.

• SAP retention and system performance and availability - Organizations that use SAP tend to generate a large volume of transactional data on a regular basis, making data archiving essential for system performance. At the same time, archived data must be readily accessible should it be needed down the road. SAP archiving is used to retain older and obsolete data on secondary storage thereby mitigating the risks, such as downtime and business disruption, associated with bloated primary storage systems. Using an SAP data retention strategy, it becomes possible to streamline primary IT systems, reduce database sizes, automate retention based on internal rules and/or regulations, and improve system performance and availability.

• SAP retention and IT cost management - Data retention can also reduce costs associated with IT administration through system consolidation as well as by decommissioning older systems.

• SAP retention and legal discovery - Legal discovery is another area where data retention can mitigate risks. With an automatic retention process in place, data is automatically indexed and stored on secondary storage where it can later be retrieved should a legal case require its discovery. Enterprises using SAP retention can quickly produce the required documents thereby reducing time, costs, and risk. For example, archived SAP data can be retrieved instantly, allowing a business to quickly respond to an e-discovery request made by an auditor, court, regulator, or internal legal discovery team. A prompt response by business also helps ensure that the business avoids any potential penalties associated with slow response times.  

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SAP data retention and archiving work together to help mitigate a variety of business risks including risks associated with regulatory compliance, system performance and availability, IT costs, and legal discovery. Though data retention and archiving involves moving data from primary to secondary storage systems, it doesn't necessarily mean that retained data is not readily available. In fact data can be retrieved on demand. At the same time, that data is not interfering with primary transactional systems which ensures smoother system performance and fewer problems. SAP retention is a win-win-win solution for organizations with massive amounts of data to manage and store.