SAP ILM (Information Lifecycle Management): ViewBox as an Alternative for System Decommissioning
By Emanuel Böminghaus, Legacy Systems Expert and Managing Director, AvenDATA
By Emanuel Böminghaus
Legacy Systems Expert and
Managing Director, AvenDATA
Managing Director, AvenDATA
SAP ILM helps companies manage, retain, and compliantly delete data across its entire lifecycle. But not every company wants to keep an existing SAP landscape running indefinitely just to preserve historical data. This is exactly where AvenDATA’s ViewBox becomes a compelling alternative to SAP ILM. Decommissioning legacy SAP systems is about far more than a technical migration. Companies must keep business data, records, and documents available for many years, while at the same time shutting down infrastructure, databases, operating systems, and SAP instances. For CIOs and IT managers, this creates a trade-off between cost, compliance, and availability. A specialized archiving solution lets you archive legacy IT data and then take the production legacy system out of operation in a controlled way. This can significantly simplify the decommissioning process, particularly for SAP R/3, ECC, or system landscapes inherited through carve-outs.
Why Keeping Legacy Systems Running Becomes Expensive and Risky
A fully depreciated system is not automatically a cheap one. Aging SAP and ERP environments continue to incur costs for servers, databases, operating systems, licenses, backups, monitoring, and administration. At the same time, the technical risk keeps climbing: vendors discontinue support, security updates dry up, and internal know-how leaves with departing employees or service providers. Companies end up running critical legacy systems long after they are no longer needed operationally. On top of this come compliance risks. Information that is relevant under tax or commercial law must not be lost, yet it often has to remain traceable and retrievable years later. Anyone looking to retire legacy systems therefore needs a strategy that separates data access from system operation. The ViewBox research system is especially worth considering when the priority is fully decommissioning the source system while retaining long-term access to historical information.
Audit-Proof Data Archiving Instead of Permanent System Operation
When decommissioning a system, what matters is extracting the relevant data from the source system in a structured way and keeping it legible for the long term. Audit-proof data archiving has to guarantee traceability, access protection, and unaltered records. It must also satisfy legal and regulatory requirements, above all the retention periods defined by commercial and tax law. Storing the data is therefore not enough on its own. Business departments, auditors, and authorized users need to locate and evaluate historical information precisely, even years later. With ViewBox, data from decommissioned applications can be made available in a single central interface, without keeping the original production system running.
Shut Down Legacy Systems, Cut Costs, and Ensure Compliance
Professional archiving fundamentally changes the economics of a system decommissioning project. Companies can dismantle infrastructure, reduce licensing and maintenance costs, and free up internal IT resources from maintaining aging platforms. At the same time, historical business data stays available for business units, internal audit, and external reviews. Instead of permanently operating several legacy systems built on different technologies, you consolidate everything onto a single archiving platform. That reduces complexity and makes future consolidations, migrations, and acquisitions far easier. ViewBox is an especially strong fit for companies that want not just to archive data but to actually shut down existing SAP and other ERP systems. AvenDATA supports the extraction, migration, and audit-proof provisioning of your legacy data. This lets you retire legacy systems in a controlled way, lower ongoing costs, and meet compliance requirements over the long term. Talk to AvenDATA to find out which systems you can decommission securely, compliantly, and permanently.
Are your old SAP and ERP systems still costing you money even though they’re no longer needed operationally? AvenDATA handles the audit-proof archiving of your historical data and lays the foundation for a worry-free system shutdown.
Reduce your infrastructure, licensing, and administration costs, meet your compliance requirements, and keep access to your legacy data at all times. Contact AvenDATA and have us assess which legacy systems in your IT landscape can be shut down.