High Compliance, High Performance: The Business Case for ILM

Data archiving improves performance and manages costs. Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) adds a new level: manage data retention and access requirements to protect the organization from risk.

ILM is the practice of thinking and acting strategically about how data is managed in the organization: where it is stored, how quickly can it be accessed, how it is tracked, and how long it is retained. Smart investment in ILM delivers on the promise of high compliance and high performance for SAP solutions.

A data archiving strategy is the first step in any ILM process. Dolphin helps customers create data archiving strategies for SAP R/3 or ERP including DART and Business Intelligence (BI), as well as system consolidation, legacy data and legacy system decommissioning solutions.

The Compliance Conundrum
Compliance drives ILM for good reason. Compliance with laws and regulations from SOX and SEC reporting to HIPAA requirements and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act can impact legal disputes and regulatory approvals… or the very survival of the business.

But not all information needs to be retained forever, and few businesses would want to do so. Infinite retention increases liability risks ranging from potential data privacy breaches to legal exposure.

The IT challenge: retain what must be retained, keep it accessible, and destroy what should be destroyed – all while managing costs.

ILM strategy defines policies and integrates records retention requirements into short and long-term resource planning. This gives executives the confidence that the right procedures are in place from records creation to archive retention and end-of-life – in ways that are responsible, efficient and cost effective.

SAP Performance at the Speed of Thought
We know SAP system users want every record and report available at the speed of thought. Unfortunately, the more records available online, the larger the database and the slower the response times. Effective data archiving strategy frees the online database for the most active records.

At Dolphin, we have found that 75 to 80 percent of the records in SAP databases are static – data that needs no further modification. Smart data archiving strategy moves these ‘business complete' records and documents off of the production database and onto an accessible offline archive to improve runtime and help meet service level agreements for backup and recovery. Moreover, data archiving lowers the total cost of ownership.

Dolphin’s phased approach starts with collaboration between the IT team that manages the data and the business people who use it. After analysis of retention times and retrieval needs, we prepare a comprehensive Blueprint for the archiving strategy.

ILM for SAP – Get Started Now
SAP’s forthcoming ILM from SAP solution will enhance how customers can manage, identify and categorize information for data archiving, retention management and data warehousing. The new features will be particularly useful for implementing more robust retention management policies and integrating third-party content management systems (CMS) through ArchiveLink.

Up-front analysis and planning for ILM now pays off in the short and long term through faster system performance and accelerated implementation. The result: High compliance, high performance and lower total cost of ownership.

top