For many organizations planning a move to SAP RISE, the technical migration is only one part of the challenge. Just as important is ensuring the business case makes financial sense. As SAP environments accumulate years of transactional and historical data, organizations often discover that retaining unnecessary data in the cloud significantly increases subscription costs, infrastructure requirements, migration complexity, and project timelines.
This was the challenge facing Waters Corporation. The global enterprise had already committed to modernizing its SAP landscape, but the projected cost of SAP RISE threatened the viability of the initiative. To move forward, the organization needed a way to dramatically reduce the size of its SAP environment before migration while maintaining compliance, business continuity, and access to historical information. Partnering with SAP and Auritas, Waters implemented a comprehensive SAP Data Volume Management (DVM) strategy that reduced its SAP footprint by 55%, generated more than $5 million in projected savings over five years, and positioned the organization for a successful migration to SAP RISE.
The Challenge: Making RISE with SAP Financially Viable
Like many enterprises running mature SAP environments, Waters had accumulated years of operational and historical data across multiple SAP systems. While much of this information remained valuable for audit and compliance purposes, a significant portion no longer needed to reside within the production database.
During planning for SAP RISE, financial modeling revealed a significant obstacle. To justify the migration investment, the organization needed to reduce its overall SAP landscape by approximately 40%. Without achieving that target, the projected cloud subscription costs would make the business case difficult to approve.
Rather than simply accepting higher cloud costs, Waters sought a strategic approach to optimize its environment before migration.
Building a Data Volume Management Strategy
Recognizing that successful data optimization requires both business and technical alignment, Auritas began the engagement with a Data Volume Management workshop. The objective was to educate stakeholders on how archiving, data lifecycle management, and system optimization could directly reduce SAP RISE costs while improving overall system performance.
The first technical phase consisted of a comprehensive Data Volume Assessment (DVA). Rather than treating every database equally, the assessment identified where the greatest reduction opportunities existed and prioritized archiving efforts based on business value, technical complexity, and compliance requirements. This assessment became the roadmap for the entire project, allowing Waters to make informed decisions about which data could be archived, what needed to remain online, and how to maximize savings without disrupting business operations.
A Phased Approach to Data Reduction
Instead of attempting to archive every application simultaneously, Auritas implemented a phased strategy designed to deliver measurable results quickly while minimizing project risk. The initial phase focused on technical data, allowing the project team to begin reducing system size immediately without affecting day-to-day business processes. This accelerated early progress and ensured the SAP RISE timeline remained on schedule.
Following this foundation, Auritas implemented nine SAP archiving objects across four SAP systems, including SAP ECC, BW, GTS and APO.
Each implementation followed SAP archiving best practices while preserving business accessibility, compliance requirements, and long-term reporting needs. The phased methodology not only simplified project execution but ultimately enabled Waters to exceed its original reduction target. This phased approach reduced over 55% in just over 9 months.
Maintaining Long-Term Optimization with Data ASSIST
One of the most common challenges organizations face after completing an archiving project is maintaining the results. Without ongoing governance, databases quickly begin growing again, eventually recreating the same performance and cost issues.
To address this, Auritas implemented Data ASSIST, its automated data archiving and scheduling solution. Rather than relying on manual archiving projects every few years, Data ASSIST continuously monitors database growth, automates recurring archive jobs, provides visibility into system health, and ensures the SAP landscape remains appropriately sized over time.
This transforms data volume management from a one-time project into an ongoing operational practice, helping organizations sustain lower infrastructure costs and maximize the long-term value of SAP RISE investments.
The Results
The project exceeded its original objectives and delivered measurable business value. Key outcomes included:
- 55% reduction in SAP database size across ECC, BW, GTS, and APO.
- More than $5 million in projected savings over five years.
- Successful preparation for SAP RISE while maintaining project timelines.
- Automated archive scheduling to control future database growth.
- Long-term visibility into database health and optimization opportunities through Data ASSIST.
Perhaps most importantly, Waters surpassed the original 40% reduction goal required to financially justify the SAP RISE migration, providing both immediate cost savings and a sustainable strategy for future growth.
Why Data Volume Management Should Be Part of Every SAP RISE Strategy
Many organizations view data archiving as an infrastructure initiative focused solely on reducing storage. In reality, effective data volume management has become a strategic component of SAP modernization. SAP itself recognizes data volume management as a lifecycle discipline that includes data discovery, profiling, archiving, monitoring, and continuous optimization to control database growth while supporting compliance and operational efficiency.
Organizations that reduce unnecessary data before migrating to SAP RISE can often realize benefits including:
- Lower cloud subscription and infrastructure costs.
- Faster migrations with reduced project risk.
- Improved system performance and shorter backup windows.
- Better governance over historical business data.
- Sustainable database growth through automated lifecycle management.
Rather than moving decades of inactive information into a new environment, organizations can migrate only what delivers business value while retaining historical records in a compliant, accessible archive.
For organizations evaluating SAP RISE, data volume optimization should be one of the earliest planning activities, not an afterthought. A comprehensive assessment, phased archiving strategy, and automated lifecycle management can dramatically improve both the financial and operational success of a cloud transformation initiative, ensuring organizations move to SAP RISE with a cleaner, leaner, and more cost-effective SAP landscape.
