You have now decided to migrate to S/4 HANA, worked with your business departments to identify data to be archived, and have started to move recent and most accessed data to the new SAP S/4HANA. So how about your legacy SAP systems?
Decommissioning legacy systems after the move to S/4HANA
There are a host of benefits to be derived from decommissioning your legacy SAP system, and not just financial. Decommissioning your SAP legacy system will help you minimize costs significantly and ensure that only relevant and authoritative users can access legacy data for compliance and regulatory purposes.
Whilst there can be significant costs involved in maintaining legacy systems, there are also business risks involved, particularly where there is potential loss of expertise and diminishing levels of familiarity with legacy systems.
The cost of keeping legacy systems operational after the move to S/4HANA
Keeping legacy systems running in the background or in parallel with your new SAP S/4 HANA system means your costs rise because of the following:
- Hardware maintenance
- Hosting fees (if server is elsewhere)
- Human resource to oversee legacy system/s
- Security costs due to more complex system landscape that increases risk to breakdown and other IT issues
Why you may want to retain your legacy SAP system
We understand that there are drivers for keeping your SAP legacy system. Commonly, these come down to the following;
- Information and inspection purposes
- To meet legal retention periods for different data modules.
For your legacy system it’s important to keep in mind the big picture goal of retaining only the data required for legal or other audit purposes until it has fulfilled its required retention time and may be purged.
When migrating over to SAP S/4HANA you will want to consider and evaluate whether this data should be maintained in your legacy system. If you’re not migrating certain data from your legacy system to your S/4HANA system, then archiving (or removing) that data can remove the need for the legacy system entirely.
At TJC, we can examine and analyse your SAP legacy data down to company, global, and local levels across your multi-country system landscape. This gives you precision targeting for your conversion roadmap to S/4HANA whilst ensuring you will have access to audit-ready data.
Find out more about our legacy SAP decommissioning solution or download the solution sheet to share with your colleagues.
