What You Shouldn't Migrate to S4HANA: Streamlining SAP Modernization
- jpalhinhas
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 13 hours ago
By Bob Messegee, CTO
If you are planning a move to SAP S/4HANA, you already know the headlines. The 2027 deadline is approaching. Migration programs are complex. Skilled SAP resources are scarce and expensive. And every decision you make today has long-term cost implications.
What often gets less attention is one of the biggest levers you have to reduce risk, cost, and complexity before migration even begins: how you handle your SAP data and content.
Your SAP system has quietly accumulated enormous volumes of historical data, documents, attachments, print lists, and archived business objects. Much of it is rarely accessed, but how and if you retain and store this content becomes a potential issue when you migrate.
The Hidden Cost of Carrying Everything Forward
In your current SAP environment, data sprawl is inconvenient, but in S/4HANA, it becomes expensive.
S/4HANA’s architecture delivers incredible performance, but it changes the economics of storage entirely. Content that once lived quietly in database tables now consumes premium memory resources. Tables, files, and historical archives can collectively add hundreds of gigabytes or more to your footprint.
That extra data directly impacts:
Infrastructure sizing and cloud subscription costs
Migration timelines and testing cycles
Ongoing maintenance and operational spend
Post-migration system performance
In many projects, organizations unintentionally migrate large volumes of data and content simply because it was never addressed early enough. By the time migration is underway, it can be difficult to change course.
Why Traditional Archiving Approaches Fall Short
Most SAP customers already have some form of archiving in place. Unfortunately, many of those approaches were designed for a different era.
Legacy ECM platforms often introduce their own challenges: high licensing costs, complex infrastructure, rigid architecture, and limited cloud readiness. In some cases, they actually increase migration scope rather than reduce it. Legacy ECM platforms also do little to address the intelligence and automation that organizations now expect from modern platforms.
The result is a familiar dilemma: do you keep expensive data in HANA, in a legacy ECM system, or should you explore more modern content solutions?
Archiving as a Strategic Content Enabler
The most successful S/4HANA migrations treat archiving as a strategic activity, not an afterthought.
Modern archiving is no longer just about storage costs. It's about creating a foundation that serves you long after go-live. When you move SAP content to a platform designed for intelligent content services, you're not just reducing your HANA footprint, you're making that content usable in new ways.
Consider what happens when your archived purchase orders, contracts, and historical documents are in a system with proper metadata, search capabilities, and API access. Finance can analyze spending patterns across suppliers without custom SAP reports. Legal can surface relevant contracts when reviewing vendor relationships. Your AI initiatives can actually access the business context they need instead of hitting dead ends in legacy repositories.
The migration itself gets simpler. But the real value shows up in the months and years that follow, when business teams can actually work with historical data instead of just storing it.
Focus Your SAP Resources Where They Matter Most
S/4HANA migrations already demand scarce expertise: business process redesign, custom code remediation, integration testing, and change management. Your Basis team has a finite capacity.
Here's a common scenario: Mid-migration, performance testing reveals issues. Investigation shows historical data and archived content consuming significant memory resources. Now you have a choice: accept degraded performance in your new environment, increase infrastructure costs to accommodate it, or pause to implement an archiving strategy while other workstreams are in flight.
None of these are ideal outcomes, but they're avoidable.
When archiving is handled as a parallel workstream—independent of the migration itself—it simply removes variables from the equation. Your test environments perform more predictably. Infrastructure sizing is clearer from the start. Performance issues, when they occur, are easier to diagnose because you're not fighting data volume problems at the same time.
The migration work still requires the same expertise and attention, but you're not adding archiving complexity on top of everything else.
A Modern Alternative for SAP Archiving
In my white paper Streamlining SAP/HANA Migration Through Intelligent Content Archiving, I outline a modern approach built specifically for today’s SAP realities.
The paper explores:
The true scope of SAP data bloat, beyond commonly cited tables
Why “do nothing” is often the most expensive option
How cloud-native, SaaS-based archiving changes the economics of S/4HANA
What to look for in an archiving solution
How intelligent content archiving can be deployed in parallel with migration planning
This white paper also walks through how organizations can offload significant volumes of content out of HANA, simplify migration scope, and establish a future-ready content foundation that supports automation and AI initiatives after S/4HANA is live.
Taking the time to modernize your archiving strategy now can be one of the smartest decisions you make on your S/4HANA journey.
If you are planning or actively preparing for S/4HANA, I've written a more detailed exploration of this topic that digs into the specifics.
Download the White Paper: Streamlining SAP/HANA Migration Through Intelligent Content Archiving: Reducing costs and complexity in SAP modernization.
