Is Data Archiving included in RISE with SAP? 

Author: Jérôme Philipps, SAP Archiving & ILM team lead Co-author: Christopher Bicknell, SAP Archiving & ILM Consultant

The short answer is no, and that catches many organisations off guard. RISE with SAP bundles infrastructure, hosting, and technical operations into a single subscription, but it does not include data archiving. That means your HANA database will keep growing with every transaction, every document, and every business record, and the cost of that growth sits entirely on your shoulders.

Here is the problem: RISE contracts are tied to fixed “T-shirt sized” HANA memory allocations. Once your data outgrows that allocation, you face an upgrade to a larger, more expensive tier, a cost most teams never budgeted for. Without a proactive archiving strategy, the question is not whether you will hit that ceiling, but when. Keep reading to find out how to avoid jumping into the next HANA T-shirt size.

Introduction 

RISE with SAP covers SAP S/4HANA Cloud, cloud infrastructure, SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) credits, and technical managed services in a single subscription. This compelling offering simplifies procurement and accelerates the move to the cloud. However, that subscription has clear boundaries.

Enterprise data archiving is not part of the RISE with SAP contract. It remains a standalone component of the IT landscape and requires its own process management

RISE with SAP comes with a fixed “T-shirt sized” allocation of HANA memory, which depends on the number of FUE and number of licensed users with access to the cloud and RISE with SAP environments.

SAP data volumes continue to grow over time, increasing memory and storage requirements if they are not actively managed. Organisations carrying unnecessary data into RISE with SAP can end up with a larger HANA footprint and, consequently, higher recurring costs.

Experts suggest organisations that complete structured housekeeping and archiving programmes typically reduce database volume by 20–40% before migration, potentially resulting in lower RISE capacity.

SAP itself recommends monitoring historical database growth and implementing retention, archiving and data-volume management strategies to keep systems lean and control performance and TCO. 

Many discover this only in the later phases of their RISE project, sometimes as late as during the cutover. Understanding this gap from the outset is essential for planning a realistic data management strategy.

Real example: a RISE with SAP multi-year challenge 

Imagine an organisation that entered RISE with SAP with an S T-shirt size. Its environment was sized for its requirements, the migration was complete, and initially, everything looked picture-perfect. 

But over time, things started going downhill. Every month brought new transactions, documents and business records. Like books being added to a library without older ones ever leaving the shelves, data kept accumulating. What had once fitted comfortably within the S-size environment, gradually began to consume more of its available capacity. 

As this growth continued, the organisation moved closer to the limits of its existing sizing. At some point, what was once sufficient as an S-size environment could require a move to a larger T-shirt size to meet growing requirements. 

The impact wasn’t limited to capacity. A larger active database meant a bigger production footprint to manage across activities such as backups, upgrades and future migrations. What had started as gradual database growth was becoming a longer-term operational and capacity-planning concern. 

This is where the organisation realised that data archiving, although not included in the RISE package, was not something it could be overlooked. 

Under RISE with SAP, every gigabyte of data you carry into S/4HANA has a direct cost, in HANA memory, storage tiering, and your ongoing subscription. Before you migrate, it’s worth knowing exactly how much you could leave behind. TJC’s Archiving Calculator quantifies the storage, and financial savings archiving can deliver, giving you a clearer figure to bring into your RISE sizing conversations. 

Calculate your RISE savings: use TJC Group’s RISE calculator to quantify the financial savings of a RISE Archiving project with TJC Grou. Open SAP RISE with SAP calculator.

Where SAP’s responsibility ends, and yours begins: data volume management is a must 

Here is how responsibilities are divided by function. 

SAP manages: 

• Cloud infrastructure and hosting 

• Technical managed services  

• System availability (99.7%+ SLA for production) 

• Platform updates and security patching 

SAP customers are responsible for: 

• Information lifecycle management  

• Data volume management and HANA database growth control 

• Compliance with data privacy regulations (e.g. GDPR) 

• Audit and tax data readiness 

• Legacy system data accessibility 

This means SAP ensures your infrastructure runs smoothly. However, strategic decisions include what data to keep active, what to archive and how to maintain compliance.

Read more about data preparation for s/4hana in the following article:

These aspects are entirely in the organisation’s hands. Data archiving in RISE with SAP is not an optional add-on; it is fundamental to running a well-managed system. 

Common challenges of data growth in a RISE with SAP environment 

Uncontrolled SAP S/4HANA data growth in a RISE environment creates a compounding challenge that touches four interconnected areas. 

Cost escalation 
HANA is an in-memory database. Every gigabyte of data held in the active system must reside in expensive high-speed memory. As data volumes grow, you move closer to the boundary of your t-shirt allocation. Crossing that boundary means upgrading to a larger, costlier tier. Unlike traditional databases where storage is relatively inexpensive, HANA memory carries a premium, and unmanaged growth turns it into a recurring financial burden. 

Uncontrolled growth and operational risk 
Beyond cost and analytics, uncontrolled data growth affects system performance. Larger tables delay query resolution, lengthen batch job runtimes, and reduce responsiveness. Eventually, what was designed to be a lean, high-performing system gradually becomes sluggish under its own weight. 

The Clean Core challenge 
SAP’s Clean Core approach encourages organisations to maintain a lean and manageable S/4HANA environment. But even with a well-managed technical environment, growing transaction volumes and historical records can make it harder to keep the system lean and productive. Organisations therefore need to consider how they will manage data throughout its lifecycle, rather than letting the active database grow indefinitely.

Solution: prepare a continuous archiving strategy for RISE with SAP 

The company is responsible for creating a continuous archiving strategy to manage incoming data. Here are four key factors to keep in mind: 

1. Set an archiving ratio
A well-run archiving programme tracks the proportion of data systematically archived against the volume entering the system. Aligning archiving with incoming data helps control HANA growth and reduces the risk of needing to step up a tier, avoiding the immediate, one-off cost of moving to a larger, more expensive size. Organisations can also use an ROI calculator to estimate how different archiving scenarios could affect their data footprint and potential savings. 

2. Keep the productive footprint lean to reduce TCO
Beyond avoiding a tier upgrade, a smaller productive database changes the day-to-day cost of running the system: shorter downtime during updates, faster backups and recovery, and less data to process, store, and manage on an ongoing basis. These operational savings compound over time, lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) well beyond the immediate archiving exercise, and leaving less data to carry into future upgrades and migrations. 

3. Monitor growth against your RISE sizing commitments
Optimising volumes by tracking growth trends while approaching a critical threshold is necessary to prevent it from turning into a cost or performance issue. It’s the difference between an unpredictable cost variable and something you can actually plan around. 

4. Make it continuous, not occasional
An ongoing data volume reduction strategy (not a one-off cleanup) is what keeps things under control. Data archiving isn’t a one-time process you forget afterwards. Data volumes usually keep growing with everyday operations. Therefore, archiving is an ongoing discipline: automated where possible, monitored consistently, and adjusted as data patterns change. 

Know the full story of about British Telecom Group data archiving journey.

“Automation is the big win. Trying to do data archiving without that is almost like trying to put somebody on a hamster wheel. It’s hard work. Automating the process with the Archiving Sessions Cockpit (ASC) by TJC Group makes it much easier. It’s an automated process so once you get it up and running, it’s there” , Mark Holmes, ERP Architect at British Telecom

Compliance doesn’t end when data leaves the active database

Archiving data does not end the obligations attached to it. Archived records may still need to be retained for defined periods to meet tax, audit, regulatory, or data privacy requirements. 

This keeps data archiving connected to the wider data lifecycle: reducing the productive footprint while ensuring retained information remains accessible and governed for as long as necessary. 

“A sound archiving strategy therefore needs to consider not only what data leaves the productive system, but how long it should be retained, how it can be retrieved when required, and when it can eventually be destroyed”, Jérôme Philips, Team Lead SAP Data Archiving and ILM at TJC Group

Data archiving is a very manual job, like mark holmes BT Group says “it’s like putting a hamster in a wheel”. the moment the hamster stops running, data archiving stops. However, if there is automation in place, you define the rules ones and then it’s there, it’s done. it makes SAP basis lives much easier.

How does TJC Group enable data growth stays within the contracted t-shirt size in RISE with SAP? 

Under RISE with SAP, the t-shirt size integrates the number of FUE and the database capacity in the contract. If data volumes grow beyond that threshold, additional capacity typically comes at extra cost, which is why keeping growth under control matters throughout the life of the contract, not just at go-live. 

TJC Group addresses this through a managed archiving service designed specifically for RISE customers. The service covers at least 10 archive objects, implemented and maintained across the length of the engagement, along with monthly monitoring reports and alerts whenever archiving ratios indicate that growth could put the contracted t-shirt size at risk. This gives customers visibility into how their data footprint is evolving, well before it becomes a capacity issue. 

At the center of this service is the Archiving Sessions Cockpit (ASC), TJC’s SAP-certified automation engine. Rather than relying on manual archiving runs, ASC schedules and executes archiving sessions automatically across all systems in the landscape.

What makes ASC particularly valuable in a RISE context is that it applies business rules tailored to each SAP system: taking into account specific retention periods, residence policies, and business requirements per company code, country, or process. This means archiving decisions reflect how each part of the business actually operates, rather than a one-size-fits-all schedule. 

“TJC Group have the Archive Sessions Cockpit, which basically automates your archiving process. It gives you complete control over it. The ASC definitely made our life easier”, Senior Delivery manager at Diversey, a Solenis company.

The result is a continuous, rules-based approach to data volume management that helps RISE customers stay within their contracted capacity while maintaining compliant, accessible archives across their SAP landscape. 

Find out how automated data archiving reduces manual workload for SAP Basis teams.

How to access archived data easily in RISE with SAP? 

Archiving reduces the data held in the productive HANA environment, but it doesn’t mean the information disappears. Historical SAP data must remain accessible for audit requests, tax reporting, regulatory compliance, customer enquiries or business analysis, among other reasons.

A practical retrieval approach considers:

• how easily business users can search for information 

• view related records 

• generate reports 

• work across data from different periods or systems 

A central access layer can provide a consistent way to work with archived data in the SAP RISE ecosystem. It enhances the RISE experience by giving users a consistent way to search and retrieve retained information. Solutions such as Enterprise Legacy System Application (ELSA) provide this interface without requiring users to work through complex backend transactions. 

This approach can support a more coherent architecture: a lean S/4HANA environment on RISE, complemented by accessible historical information to meet compliance, audit, and business requirements. 

Conclusion

RISE with SAP provides a strong foundation for moving SAP workloads to the cloud, but data growth still needs active management. Because data archiving sits outside the standard contract, organisations must decide how to manage active, archived, and historical information throughout the lifecycle. 

That means understanding the current data footprint, monitoring growth against RISE sizing, establishing continuous archiving, and ensuring retained information remains accessible when the business needs it. 

Every gigabyte left unmanaged in your SAP database has a cost, in storage, in performance, and in your HANA memory bill. Rather than estimate, you can measure it.  

Get in touch with us to find out how much storage space you could free up and what that translates to in financial savings, for both SAP ECC and S/4HANA. Not a sales pitch, just a genuine, honest conversation with one of our consultants.

External sources of information:

• SAP HANA Administration Guide for SAP HANA Platform, SAP HANA used memory.
• SAP Business AI Platform, ABAP environment, Managing data growh.
• RISE with SAP.
• RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition: Cybersecurity FAQ Explained