Sunsetting and storing SAP data with Archive Central

SUMMARY: Business changes such as mergers, divestitures and moving to SAP S/4HANA create an opportunity to clean up the data landscape before transition. Keeping legacy SAP systems in read-only mode or extracting data ‘as is’ carries risks. SAP bulk extraction is complex due to cluster tables, ABAP programmes, table-level extraction limits and SAP BW’s aggregated data. EPI-USE Labs' Archive Central enables coherent extraction, secure searchable access, compliance, and decommissioning legacy systems while retaining full control.

Business changes – such as adapting to mergers and divestitures or embracing new technology like SAP S/4HANA – create a valuable opportunity to clean up your data landscape before the transition. If this is done right, this ensures your new SAP environment is not only lean and optimised, but also compliant with regulations and data privacy legislation.

Data that is no longer required for day-to-day operations may still be needed for auditing and compliance purposes. While this data is typically accessed on an ad hoc basis, when it is needed, access must be easy, fast and secure.

This is where many organisations run into challenges.

Some organisations choose to keep legacy SAP systems running in read-only mode to retain data access. Others extract data ‘as is’, and hope this will be sufficient. Both approaches carry risks, whether in terms of ongoing infrastructure and resource costs, technical complexity, potential audit findings when data cannot be accessed quickly or meaningfully, or data privacy compliance (including with GDPR).

EPI-USE Labs’ Archive Central solution addresses this challenge, enabling organisations to decommission legacy systems quickly and correctly, while retaining secure, reliable access to their data quickly and easily.

At its core, this comes down to two fundamental questions:

• How do you extract the exact data that needs to be sunsetted?
• And how do you then store and access that data once it has been archived?

Extracting the right SAP data in the first place

This is far from trivial.

SAP was not designed for bulk data extraction. Its data is highly relational and often stored in complex structures such as cluster tables (for example, PCL2 and PCL4), where dependencies are tightly coupled with business logic. Simply exporting an SAP database does not result in usable data for archiving.

Organisations often attempt to work around this in different ways.

Some pursue custom ABAP extraction programmes. These are typically time-consuming and expensive, requiring deep functional expertise. Data relationships must be rebuilt; consistency ensured, and outputs then validated. Even after significant effort, a question remains: how do you know everything has been extracted correctly?

Others opt for table-level extraction using tools like SE16 or direct database access. While technically straightforward, this approach strips away business meaning and documents’ structure. The relationships between SAP objects are lost, leaving fragmented datasets that are difficult to interpret.

Some turn to SAP BW extraction. However, this only provides aggregated data. and lacks the full context and detailed, audit-level information required for compliance and traceability.

At EPI-USE Labs we leverage our proprietary solution, Archive Extractor, to help organisations address these challenges by ensuring SAP data is extracted in a coherent and structured way.  Rather than treating SAP as a collection of tables, Archive Extractor preserves the integrity of relationships across complex data structures. It handles de-clustering of tables and includes associated unstructured data, such as attachments.

Automated analysis tools provided scan the SAP environment to identify the optimal datasets for archiving, ensuring alignment with data retention policies. This reduces manual effort, minimises risk, and accelerates the extraction process.

Extraction can be performed at a granular level – down to specific Objects and their dependencies – or across an entire SAP client. Compared to bespoke extraction approaches, the data consistency, coupled with time and cost savings, is significant.

Once extracted, where does the data live?

Modern IT landscapes are rarely simple. They often consist of multiple systems and platforms, leading to fragmented data environments. Archiving removes data from the live system – but the need for access to this going forward does not disappear.

Users still require access for audits, HR queries, financial investigations, and compliance checks. However, standard SAP archives (ADK files) are not designed for modern use. They are difficult to search, require technical expertise to access, and integrate poorly with analytics tools, which can result in a frustrating user experience.

In addition, auditors need fast access to complete and traceable datasets. Compliance teams must manage varying retention periods and privacy regulations across regions, including frameworks such as GDPR. Without a robust solution, organisations risk inefficiencies, delays, and potential compliance issues.

Who owns this problem?

This is often the overlooked question.

Responsibility for SAP data archiving typically sits within an intersection of IT, compliance, and the business – but ownership is not always clearly defined. Without a unified approach, organisations risk fragmented solutions that fail to fully address the problem.

Archive Central provides a single, unified platform to address these challenges.

Specifically designed to address the above challenges, Archive Central consolidates archived data from SAP, enabling organisations to link related records across different sources. Whether it’s customer data, vendor information, or financial transactions, everything is brought together into a coherent, searchable view.

Granular access controls ensure data is secure while supporting compliance requirements. Users can view complete datasets or seamlessly navigate between linked data collections.

Delivered as a hosted SaaS solution, Archive Central leverages elastic scaling and storage, offers multiple hosting locations to meet security and data privacy regulations, and uses global content delivery networks to ensure fast access.

Importantly, Archive Central is not limited to SAP. It supports data from a wide range of systems, including Microsoft platforms, Oracle databases, custom applications, and legacy systems. Most organisations run a hybrid of technologies.

For organisations that already have extraction tools or in-house expertise, Archive Central provides flexibility. It can ingest and manage externally extracted data, adapting to different formats and source systems with ease. Archive Central addresses legacy data storage and compliance needs, providing read-only access to meet legal requirements.

Decommission legacy systems while retaining full control

The complexity and importance of SAP data sunsetting is often underestimated.

It is not simply about moving data out of a system; it is about ensuring that data is extracted correctly in SAP’s structure and remains meaningful, securely accessible, and compliant over time.

With the right approach, organisations can confidently decommission legacy systems while retaining full control over their data – reducing costs, simplifying their landscape, and meeting compliance requirements without compromise.