information lifecycle management with sap® software

SAP Technical BriefSAP NetWeaverSAP Information Lifecycle Management

Information Lifecycle Management with SAP® Software

BenefitsSolutionObjectives Quick Facts

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2 / 9 © 2013 SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

Objectives

Drive efficiency and compliance in business data managementInformation is any company’s single most important asset. However, the complexity and expense of managing information means that traditional data management strategies are no longer sufficient. How can your company deal with the explosive growth of its database size and the growing number of regulations that restrict how long data can – or must – be retained?

With the latest regulatory mandates, companies are required to maintain multiple, and some-times redundant, systems to provide continued access to data for auditing and reporting pur-poses. For most companies, maintaining inactive systems just to store this data is an expensive proposition once you add up the costs for staff-ing, equipment, and energy consumption.

How can your organization decommission redundant systems containing data from legacy systems while preserving compliance with information retention regulations in both live and decommissioned environments?

With the SAP® Information Lifecycle Manage-ment component, you can support retention management and system decommissioning.

Drive efficiency and compliance in business data management

Benefits Quick FactsSolution


Satisfy a range of needs with retention managementFor information retention, SAP Information Lifecycle Management can help you define and manage data policies to satisfy numerous objec-tives. These policies can be used to address legal requirements, meet service-level agree-ments, support the retention of structured and unstructured data, and keep track of the reten-tion times and locations of paper documents. You can enter rules and policies based on vari-ous criteria, including how long data should be kept, when it can be destroyed, and where it should be stored.

You can also create and centrally store poli-cies and rules for all your business objects, whether the data originated from an SAP application or other software. All policies are directly based on an audit area, which is the starting point for all information lifecycle man-agement (ILM) activities managed with SAP software. Objects can be governed by their own policies and rules or can inherit the poli-cies from superordinate objects. For example, a scanned check can inherit the policies of its associated financial document.

With SAP Information Lifecycle Management, you can store and access archived data by maintaining policies and rules for your software.

Satisfy a range of needs with retention management

Stay in control of your data volumes with data archiving

Support a standardized method for system decommissioning

Interpret and understand archived data within context

Audit data from one or more decommissioned systems

Solution BenefitsObjectives Quick Facts


Stay in control of your data volumes with data archivingBy using SAP Information Lifecycle Manage-ment for data archiving, you can get a better handle on your data volumes and achieve greater data-center efficiency. Once data from SAP software is no longer needed on a daily basis, you can archive it in your storage system. The software automatically routes the data to specified areas in the storage system accord-ing to your defined hierarchy.

SAP Information Lifecycle Management auto-matically calculates an expiration date based on your business rules.* From a list of archived

data objects eligible for destruction, you can choose which objects to destroy and elimi-nate them from the archive through a secure procedure.

To protect data from destruction even after the expiration date is reached, you can cate-gorize data and apply a legal hold. The legal case management function enables the setup of a legal case and management of related information found through the e-discovery function. The software overrides all other poli-cies and rules for that document until the legal hold is lifted.

You can streamline the entire archiving process and help ensure compliance with legal requirements of a variety of countries.







FOOTNOTE

*To enforce expiration dates reliably, SAP recommends that customers use a storage product that is certified by SAP to interoperate with SAP Information Lifecycle Management.


Support a standardized method for system decommissioningUntil now, companies have lacked a standard-ized method for system decommissioning. Data from decommissioned systems is not exempt from legal compliance or tax audits. As a result, organizations often hesitate to shut down an old system because usually its data can be inter-preted only in the context of that system.

SAP Information Lifecycle Management offers a standardized method to shut down legacy systems by bringing data from both SAP and non-SAP software into a dedicated, fully func-tional ILM retention warehouse system.

When an SAP solution is ready to be shut down, you can remove its data by using proven, standard archiving functions that have been enhanced for ILM. In addition to archiving all “business-complete” data that is no longer needed, you can use enhanced snapshot func-tions to archive data from objects that are not yet business complete. You even archive all cor-responding contextual and customizing infor-mation, such as currency types and country codes, for auditing and reporting purposes.







Your organization can audit and report data from shutdown systems and store that data in a legally compliant manner.


Interpret and understand archived data within contextCentralized auditing and reporting functions of SAP Information Lifecycle Management enable the creation of archiving snapshots of master and customizing data and on-demand analysis of archived data. With the transfer, convert, and store function, you can move the archived data and snapshots to the retention warehouse. The warehouse is a separate enterprise resource planning system attached to a storage prod-uct that is certified by SAP to interoperate with SAP Information Lifecycle Management.

In the case of non-SAP software, the data is extracted using SAP tools, such as SAP Data Services and SAP Landscape Transformation software. The data is then mapped onto struc-tures used by SAP technology and brought into the retention warehouse. From then on, the process for data from SAP and non-SAP software is the same.

You can analyze snapshots and extracts of contextual data to interpret archived data – without the need to refer to the original system.








Audit data from one or more decommissioned systemsThe retention warehouse function of SAP Information Lifecycle Management lets you set up audit areas and then specify rules in the policy engine to support compliance with legal regulations. By reorganizing the archived files based on these rules and storing the files in the archive hierarchy, the software auto-matically routes the data to the appropriate areas in the storage product.

In the case of an imminent audit, you can select the necessary data from the archive and pre-pare the appropriate structures for running queries. Use of the audit area helps automate this process by allowing you to organize data ahead of time into the appropriate categories in your archive. Through straightforward, guided procedures, you select the data in the archive for your specific purpose and group it into an audit package.

You can use the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse application and any related busi-ness warehouse front-end software or a local reporting option to display the data from the audit package in table format in a browser. After loading the data from the audit package to the application, you can run queries by using a range of analysis and reporting tools.

Once you are finished, the audit package is deleted and the data removed from the report-ing software. However, the data continues to reside in the archive until it is needed for another audit or until the expiration date is reached.








Increased control with less risk and costSAP Information Lifecycle Management pre-serves full auditing and reporting functional-ity on archived data, centrally manages and enforces rule-based retention policies to mini-mize business risk, and gives you complete control over enterprise data management.

These functionalities enable you to: • Significantly reduce IT management costs by consolidating systems

• Maintain compliance with data retention regulations

• Reduce cost and risk associated with legal discovery

• Improve IT system performance by reducing database size

Increased control with less risk and cost


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SummaryThe SAP® Information Lifecycle Management component enables your organization to comply with information retention regulations in both live and decommissioned system environments. It provides a standardized method for decom-missioning redundant systems while preserv-ing full auditing and reporting operations on the stored data. Objectives

• Consolidate your IT infrastructure • Manage the retention of data from SAP software–based solutions

• Respond to legal discovery requests efficiently • Control the growing size of your corporate databases

Solution • Management and enforcement of retention policies company-wide

• Automated deletion of data based on policies • E-discovery and legal holds • Standardized method for shutting down legacy systems

• Auditing and reporting of data from shutdown systems

• Legally compliant storage of data

Benefits • Reduced cost of IT operations through hardware consolidation

• Improved compliance with legal and regulatory requirements for information retention

• Less cost and risk during the legal discovery phase

• Enhanced efficiency of IT processes through reduced database size

Learn moreTo find out more, call your SAP representative today or visit us online at www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/ilm.

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information lifecycle management with sap® software

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