SAPinsider interview - Peace of mind lies at the core of data management strategy

Managing data has always been challenging, due to the exponential increase in data volumes, changing governmental regulations, cybersecurity and privacy threats, plus data sovereignty concerns. Right now, many organisations are busy retiring legacy systems and migrating to new cloud based in memory applications. It’s a time of ‘data decluttering’, to reduce the long term cost of in-memory hosting for applications, like SAP S/4 HANA.

Thierry Julien, TJC Group’s founder and CEO discussed some of the challenges our customers are facing and how they can be overcome with Robert Holland, VP and Research Director at SAP Insider. This blog outlines extracts from the original interview, which was published in SAPinsider website on March 2023.

Three key takeaways:

• Organisations are producing and collecting an ever increasing volume of data, so they need to archive and manage their data in ways that are both compliant and efficient.
• Questions around data privacy, residency, and sovereignty need to be answered for current systems as well as any archived data.
• An archiving and decommissioning strategy should be viewed as a major asset for any organisation either running legacy systems or migrating to SAP S/4HANA.

What are the main challenges users are facing?

Getting shipments dispatched at the right time, with the right products and the right quantity, used to be the primary focus for organisations. Now they need to guarantee supply chain traceability whilst also managing social network discussions. That’s a huge difference in managed data. 25 years ago, a global corporation might be running a server with less than a terabyte of storage. Today, organisations generate that much data in under a day. Finding a way to achieve peace of mind when it comes to data management is one of the biggest organisational challenges we observe among end users.

Breaking this down further, there are four main areas where organisations need to achieve peace of mind: 1) automating data archiving, 2) standardising outputs for audit and tax purposes, 3) complying with data privacy requirements and 4) decommissioning legacy systems. There needs to be a top-down approach to the different data strategies employed by an organisation. Questions about data residency, data sovereignty, and data privacy need to be addressed by every organisation running enterprise systems today and especially SAP system users.

Final say

Our advice to organisations is to build a technology map that identifies legacy and current systems with the target being identifying the technology that can be removed. This allows them to use the decommissioning process as a way of removing their technology debt. A volume reduction in data may also be achievable, but the size of the reduction will depend on whether data needs to be accessed in the future. There are financial benefits to be gained, both for maintaining legacy systems and avoiding potential financial penalties, but the non-financial benefits are more important. Ultimately, if a data decommissioning strategy does not deliver peace of mind, it cannot be regarded as successful.

Read the full interview with Robert Holland and Thierry Julien: https://www.tjc-group.com/blogs/sapinsider-intervi...