Huge amounts of data that is no longer needed for day-to-day operations are languishing in IT systems at companies the world over. Invoices, annual financial statements, and business letters are just a few examples of the information that companies are legally required to retain for several years before destroying it. And we’re not just talking about information that is relevant for the fiscal and tax authorities. Pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, for example, are required to retain data about drug manufacture and patient treatment for 30 years before they are permitted to delete it.

So, deactivating legacy systems and simply deleting the information stored in them is not an option in most cases. Besides, until now, the cost and effort involved in decommissioning an SAP system always seemed too great and there was often a significant amount of manual work involved. What’s more, there was no standardized decommissioning procedure available. The result is that, at the end of their active lives, legacy systems continue to exist as costly “data graveyards” that have to be kept alive for years or, following a temporary shutdown, brought back to life at considerable expense when the data they contain is needed. To make matters worse, they also incur significant running costs in the form of electricity, cooling, maintenance, and software licenses.