When data builds up it can affect SAP system performance. The best practice for this situation is data archiving. This moves the data out of the production system in order to manage database growth while allowing business users direct, transparent access to it. But what about data created by the GRC system? It is imperative that data needed for any audit or legal requirement be immediate available.
Dolphin has a solution, the Dolphin Data Management Cockpit (DMC), which offers traditional SAP archiving and serves GRC objectives. DMC permits data encryption at the field level. It works with /virsa/ tables (especially the firefighter log tables – which can build up fast), and allows this data to be archived with standard SAP archiving protocol (using SARA). The SAP application provides archive capabilities, but this is not true archiving but more of a download/upload process. The download/upload process can take time to accomplish and can affect system performance.
The DMC solution uses the standard archiving process, which has minimal effect on your system. For data retrieval, we can update SAP Tcodes for GRC to read the archived data, making both online and archived data available to end users.
The cost of storing data in an active database can be expensive regardless of your SAP system and even more so for those using SAP HANA. Implementing an archiving strategy with transparent access to the data is a much more cost efficient alternative when data is no longer used by end users on regular bases.
Plus an added advantage to archiving, once data is archived, data cannot be altered or deleted which is ensures compliance when it comes to audits.