Gloucestershire County Council case study

Gloucestershire County Council reduced migration costs by archiving data

Industry: Public Sector | Application: Archiving | Product: SAP ILM

Gloucestershire County Council is a British county council which administers the most strategic local government services in the non-metropolitan county of Gloucestershire, in South West England. The council’s principal functions are county roads and rights of way, social services, education and libraries, but it also provides many other local government services in the area it covers.

“We specifically wanted to source a supplier via the G-Cloud framework because we knew the criteria that was needed to gain approval to this service - this meant our evaluation process could be faster, and more focused....”

Nick Lewis, Business Services Technical Lead at GCC

Introduction

With SAP ECC being replaced by S/4HANA by 2027, organisations like Gloucestershire County Council, are making early strides to prepare for the move, and reviewing the data that sits within their systems to ensure a most efficient transition that is both cost-effective and space efficient. Learn how, with the help of Proceed Group, they successfully reduced their data volume by 64%.

Background

Since 2007, Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) has been using SAP’s ERP Central Component (ECC), the previous generation of SAP’s enterprise resource planning software. ECC provides modules covering a full range of applications including finance, logistics, HR, product planning and customer service linked together into a single, customisable system run on a database.

With SAP ECC being replaced by S/4HANA by 2027, organisations like GCC, are making early strides to prepare for the move, and reviewing the data that sits within their systems to ensure a most efficient transition that is both cost- effective and space efficient.

G-Cloud paved the way for engagement with Proceed specialists

In the last year, GCC started its process of looking to streamline its data in preparation for its future move to S/4 HANA®, and potentially the cloud in the coming months and years. Realising the need to scale back the level of data it retained, GCC looked to the government led G-Cloud framework to find help with the process.

The G-Cloud is a government initiative that helps customers in the UK public sector find and buy cloud computing services, both faster and easier. Suppliers to the service are accepted on the basis of meeting strict, and stringent government security standards and to offer services that ease the procurement process and provide value to buyers. Having been an approved supplier of G-Cloud for some years, Proceed Group was one of only a handful of suppliers that were able to meet the needs of GCC.

Nick Lewis, Business Services Technical Lead at GCC said, “We specifically wanted to source a supplier via the G-Cloud framework because this is a recognised framework provided by Crown Commercial Services and we knew that our procurement process would be robust and quick. It allowed us to engage with suppliers that had key specialist skills in SAP, predominately SAP Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and who were highly experienced with archiving strategy.”

Analysing existing data in preparation for archiving

The outset of the project focused on analysis of the existing data that sat within GCC’s system, gaining an understanding of what data was taking up the most amount of space, and then based upon the findings making a decision about what would be archived. This would make the elimination process easier, but also set a precedent for data that needed to be archived in the future.

This archiving process worked hand in glove with GCC’s business retention strategy, with data that needed to remain on their production system and that which could be archived. Importantly, the GCC still needed access to archived data, which has been achieved by the use of SAP ILM which sets and automates the applied rules of data residency on their production system, and retention periods once archived will keep their data growth to a minimum, now and in the future.

With the archiving and deletion process automated using SAP ILM , rules have been built so that the archiving process implemented by Proceed will cap infrastructure and data growth to 1-2%, which in turn will reduce costs and hopes to gain improvements in performance with less data being searched for within applications.

“We’ve been delighted with our experience of working with Proceed Group, their depth of expertise and support they offer through every stage of the process has been excellent. We wouldn’t hesitate to using both Proceed and the G-Cloud service again.”

Nick Lewis, Business Services Technical Lead at GCC

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