SAP Information Lifecycle Management (SAP ILM): Why ViewBox Is Significantly More Cost-Effective!
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: High Complexity and Additional Costs in Data Archiving
SAP Information Lifecycle Management (SAP ILM) is designed to help companies retain and archive data in compliance with legal requirements and delete it once defined retention periods have expired. Its scope also includes the decommissioning of historical SAP systems.
However, when it comes to retiring SAP R/3, ECC 6.0, or older SAP industry solutions in particular, the question arises whether deploying an extensive SAP ILM architecture makes economic sense. Implementation can require additional configuration, specialized SAP consultants, technical infrastructure, and long-term operating expenses. For the SAP ILM Retention Warehouse, for example, data must be migrated, retention rules must be set up, and reporting capabilities must be provided. Companies should therefore look beyond license costs and consider all expenses for implementation, operation, maintenance, and future data access.
ViewBox Instead of SAP ILM: Shut Down SAP Systems Completely and Eliminate Operating Costs
The key economic advantage of ViewBox lies in the strict separation of historical business data from its original SAP application. Instead of continuing to operate a complex SAP landscape just to access long-closed business transactions, AvenDATA transfers the relevant data, tables, documents, and reports to a standalone archiving platform. Once migration, verification, and acceptance have been successfully completed, the original SAP system can be shut down completely. This eliminates the associated costs for servers, databases, operating systems, SAP-specific maintenance, technical support, and any licenses that may be required.
At the same time, existing SAP standard reports and custom Z reports can be replicated in ViewBox. Existing ADK archive files and DART extracts can also be incorporated. While SAP ILM relies on an SAP-specific archiving architecture, ViewBox enables long-term data access independent of the original SAP system. For large enterprises with numerous historical ERP instances in particular, this opens up considerable savings potential.
Significantly Lower Total Costs Thanks to Fixed Prices and a Lean Archiving Architecture
When assessing cost-effectiveness, what matters is the total cost of ownership (TCO). Here, ViewBox can outperform an SAP ILM solution, especially for legacy systems that are no longer in active use.
AvenDATA offers archiving projects based on clearly defined scopes of work and fixed prices. This gives companies early cost certainty for data migration, archiving, and data provisioning. Because ViewBox is browser-based and can be used independently of the original SAP application, it also reduces the need for SAP-specific operating resources.
Savings arise in several areas at once: shutting down historical IT infrastructure, eliminating ongoing maintenance expenses, lowering administration costs, and consolidating various legacy systems on a central archiving platform. Especially when several SAP systems need to be decommissioned, ViewBox can therefore be significantly more cost-effective than a custom-built SAP ILM environment. The actual savings depend on the existing system landscape, license agreements, data volumes, and business requirements.
The Highest Security Standards: How ViewBox Protects Sensitive SAP Data for the Long Term
Information security plays a critical role in archiving business-critical SAP data. ViewBox Enterprise relies on a modern security architecture with encrypted data transmission, controlled access rights, and role-based authorization concepts. By strictly separating archived data from production SAP systems, companies can also reduce the risks that arise from continuing to run outdated software, unsupported components, and historical IT infrastructure. The integrity of archived information can be verified in a traceable way using technical validation methods such as hash value checks.
In addition, differentiated retention and deletion rules, along with documented approval processes, support compliance with data protection and regulatory requirements. A key security advantage of ViewBox is that companies can shut down their outdated SAP systems completely, permanently reducing potential attack surfaces. Instead of having to keep running numerous historical SAP instances with varying security levels, companies can protect sensitive business data in a centrally managed archiving environment. Secure implementation, regular security audits, and consistent authorization management are essential.
Audit-Proof SAP Archiving with ViewBox: Lower Costs, Greater Independence
A cost-effective archiving solution must not only be affordable but also meet the requirements of auditors, tax authorities, and data protection regulations over the long term. ViewBox Enterprise provides controlled, role-based access to archived business data and supports traceable research and the retrieval of historical business transactions.
Retention and deletion rules can be implemented in line with the applicable legal and operational requirements. AvenDATA brings experience from more than 1,100 archiving projects and the decommissioning of a wide variety of ERP and enterprise applications. For companies that want to shut down their legacy SAP systems for good, SAP’s own ILM solution is therefore not automatically the most cost-effective choice.
ViewBox Offers a Powerful, SAP-Independent, and Often Significantly More Cost-Effective Alternative to SAP ILM
Before investing in SAP ILM, companies should therefore assess whether they truly need comprehensive lifecycle management for production SAP systems, or whether specialized archiving combined with complete system decommissioning would be the far more cost-effective solution.