Across industries, terabytes of new content are filling up on-premises disks and databases faster than new storage hardware can be installed. The obvious answer? Archiving to the cloud. The benefits range from reducing on-premises storage costs to improving customer experience through faster document retrieval.
We sat down with Claudia Traving, a Director of Product Marketing at OpenText™ and resident archiving technology expert, to learn more about cloud archiving.
Her 25 years of experience with both on-premises and cloud archiving solutions, such as OpenText™ Core Archive for SAP Solutions, provide her with deep insights into the day-to-day and long-term challenges of data storage.
Among the archiving-related challenges she sees most often: “Slow, paper-based processes that lead to missed opportunities. Inefficiencies that come from information siloes and manually combined data sources. And IT teams struggling to keep up with evolving internal or regulatory document storage requirements.”
Those challenges impact any organization that has yet to move to a cloud archiving solution. Focusing on SAP customers, she adds that they require “expensive appliances for large SAP databases. And as they plan to migrate large amounts of data to S/4HANA, they’re faced with longer conversion times and risky project schedules. Core Archive for SAP Solutions is designed to address all these issues,” she says.
Improving customer and employee experiences through faster processes
While cloud archiving provides a range of advantages, Traving says she sees the most significant improvements in expediting business processes.
“Almost any process is streamlined when you make electronic documents part of the workflow and shift them to a cloud archive as soon as it’s right to do so,” Traving says.
“Core Archive for SAP Solutions is designed to be process agnostic,” she explains. “It works with any business process that requires some form of document, whether that’s email, paper documents, audio, video, or any other type of digital document.”
Asked to describe an example, she points to a document intake, processing, and retrieval scenario that’s likely familiar to any organization with a contact center.
“For any chance at first-call resolution, the agent needs immediate access to the same content the customer is seeing – an invoice, for example. So, in the past, organizations felt they couldn’t readily archive that content,” Traving says. “But with cloud archiving, that information can be available instantly, without being in the way, and without using up on-premises systems.”
“And that’s a great example of the solution’s ability to securely store content and make it accessible again to business users — anytime and anywhere, and in the right business context” says Traving.
Improving compliance and security
Today, enterprises find themselves at a unique intersection: generating terabytes of documents through day-to-day business – more than ever before – and at the same time, facing ever-evolving compliance requirements.
“All countries have different laws regarding documents. For example, our customers might need to be able to produce documents in case of a tax audit or lawsuit, or simply to align with regulations such as GDPR,” Traving said.
Core Archive for SAP Solutions helps lower risk. “It provides compliance and protection through secure long-term storage of content in the cloud. And this way, your data is governed by industry-leading security and compliance practices, and protected from loss through replication and disaster recovery.”
Making it easy to move SAP data to the cloud
To address the needs of enterprises today and into the future, OpenText and SAP are helping companies make the transition from on-premises solutions to the cloud in a way that’s flexible and manageable.
Traving points to the SAP RISE program, designed to help SAP customers move to the SAP cloud. To enable a seamless migration, OpenText offers a package that bundles Core Archive for SAP Solutions together with OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions and OpenText Core Capture for SAP Solutions. These productivity solutions are a perfect fit for customers moving to S/4HANA Cloud.
“The bundle supports all S/4HANA private Cloud environments as well as the traditional environments with SAP ECC. And Core Archive for SAP Solutions has also been released as a repository for S/4HANA Cloud Essentials and the SAP Business Technology Platform, supporting SAP customers with the full range of SAP’s S/4 and ERP cloud environment,” Traving says.
“When I look at the future and our roadmap, I’m excited to continue our relationship with SAP and integrate their new environments with our solutions and deliver the same high levels of service across these environments.”
Find out more about Core Archive for SAP.
