Unified Legacy Decommissioning using SAP Information Lifecycle Management

Introduction

In today’s Enterprise Information is critical to business with multiple SAP and Non SAP Enterprise applications. These applications have both structured and unstructured data used for business, legal and audit requirement.

The challenge now before all Enterprise, is to understand how their data evolves, determine how it grows, monitor how its usage changes over time, and decide how long the data should be retained in the system. Whilst adhering to all the rules and regulations that now apply to that specific structured and unstructured data.

ILM has become especially critical to enterprises in the last two or three years. Compliance mandates, and especially legal reporting requirements, have changed and increased dramatically in number. This forces companies to think more carefully about how they compile their legal reports, what the ideal legal reporting process should look like, and how this all fits into the management of information.

SAP Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is designed to address these challenges with a combination of processes, policies, software and hardware so that the appropriate technology shall be used for each phase of the lifecycle of the data.

Typical challenges (or) risks that are to be addressed in a data lifecycle:

◉ How to ensure that the data that is required for an audit or regulatory compliance are readily available or the data that must be deleted have actually been purged from the systems?
◉ How to ensure that data from the legacy systems is still be reported
◉ How to address the increasing TCO of the unsupported legacy application and unstable legacy infrastructure?

SAP NW ILM is introducing a new approach to streamline Productive SAP System archiving and legacy system decommissioning, new support for consolidated data storage environments using SAP Sybase IQ, and a new tool to helps ILM administrators efficiently manage the information life cycle and data archiving processes.

SAP Information Lifecycle Management (SAP ILM) is based on the following pillars: ·

◉ Data archiving (active data and system)
◉ Retention management (end-of-life data)
◉ Perform e-discovery and set legal holds
◉ System decommissioning (end-of-life system)

SAP ILM Key Features: ◉ Policy Management ◉ Data Destruction ◉ Legal Holds & eDiscovery ◉ Support for Sybase IQ ◉ Audit compliant decommission of legacy SAP and Non-SAP systems ◉ Flexible reporting on legacy systems tax content and product liability content

SAP ILM Key Benefits: ◉ Archive obsolete data to enhance performance ◉ Reduction in HANA appliance footprint. ◉ Support data retention rules by creating separate archives based on varying data lifetimes ◉ Preserve compliance auditing and reporting capabilities for decommissioned systems ◉ Reduce the cost and risk of legal discovery ◉ Reduction in overall TCO

Unified approach for Legacy Decommissioning for SAP and Non-SAP environment

SAP NW ILM provides a new unified approach for retiring the Legacy SAP and Non SAP environment using the SAP SLT (System Landscape Transformation), Legacy Extraction workbench (CDE archive Objects) and SAP ILM Retention warehouse with ILM Certified stored based on Sybase IQ / SAP HANA or any SAP Certified ILM Store.

The new decommissioning solution helps to automate many manual steps, reduce the risk of errors, increase the overall data quality, and lower the overall costs and duration of decommissioning projects. The typical legacy decommissioning process is as below:

◉ Perform Data profiling to identify the scope of the data / tables to be archived

◉ Extract and load data from legacy system using SLT into the mapping tables in to target SLT environment.

     ◉ The process of mapping non-SAP content to SAP structures is automated, but can be fine-tuned to ensure correct reporting and data display later in the decommissioning process.

◉ Perform Legacy Extraction workbench (LEW) configuration to define archiving objects

◉ Define Audit Area, ILM Policies and Rules

◉ Perform LEW run to create archive objects with retentions rules

◉ Transfer Archive files to SAP ILM RW and store in ILM Certified store (Sybase IQ)

The Meta information of the legacy tables are transferred through special archiving objects that enables to retain the Meta information of the legacy tables in ILM RW for retrieval and reporting.

Retrieval and Reporting

In the newer version of SAP NW ILM, delivers enhanced reporting to address various legal and auditing reporting requirement. There are multiple reporting options including local reporting, accelerated / business user reporting and BW reporting

ILM Provides a Choice for Different Reporting Needs

• Flexible
• Use pre-delivered/existing BW content or check out increasingly available HANA content
• Use available BO portfolio and existing export functions (AIS)
• Choose between basic (local) reporting or complex queries based on (easy) modelling
• Load only data that is needed for the reporting purpose
• Comprehensive
• Extend the scope of reporting by SAP HANA (e.g. open items without sec. indices
• Report both live SAP and legacy data (SAP and Non-SAP data)Support of new scenarios (e.g. partial migration/conversion)
• Fast
• Increase the overall performance with SAP HANA (DB)
• Shorten project implementation time through content reuse

Innovative Integrate archiving solution using SAP ILM and Sybase IQ for Production environment

The customer used to use NLS for OLAP and Archivelink (or) WebDAV storage for OLTP applications. With the new SAP ILM Retention management solution for operational (live) archiving with Sybase IQ, address the challenge of having two dedicated storage for OLAP and OTLP environment.

Netweaver ILM functionality has the option to store operational data on Sybase IQ (using ILM Store Retention Services), along with the new analytical data using new native BW NLS interface for Sybase IQ (available as of SAP NW 7.30 SP09 and NW 7.31 SP07).

Storing your data in SAP Sybase IQ enables customer to consolidate the storage infrastructure on a single platform and avoid the software, hardware, network, and operations requirements associated with the integration of third-party compliant stores.

Key Benefits

◉ Unified Storage for OLTP and OLAP archiving

◉ Reduction of the volume of data and archive indexes stored

◉ Improved Performance for data archiving and accessing archived data

◉ Increased search capabilities