Abubacker Malik SHWhat Is the 2027 SAP HCM Deadline?
SAP announced to end mainstream maintenance for SAP ERP HCM by December 2027, with a costly extension till 2030. This for thousands of organizations globally marks a pivotal turning point in their HR technology strategy and has pushed many HR leaders to revisit their digital roadmap.
With SAP SuccessFactors positioned as the natural successor, many enterprises are already planning (or actively executing) their migration. SAP SuccessFactors, its cloud-first alternative, offers a modernized, integrated approach to HR, payroll, and time management.
But one critical question often goes unanswered:
What happens to all the historical HR and payroll data sitting in SAP HCM?
Most of it doesn’t automatically transfer. That leaves organizations exposed to compliance risks, audit failures, and ongoing HCM license costs just to retain access to history.
If you’re wondering how to ensure compliance, auditability, and accessibility of this data, without bogging down your new cloud system, you’re not alone. In this blog, we explain the hidden risks of historical data loss, and how Archon Data Store (ADS) provides a compliant, cost-effective way to archive legacy SAP HCM data during your migration to SuccessFactors.
What Happens to Your Historical HR Data?
When moving from SAP HCM to SuccessFactors, most organizations quickly face a harsh reality: SuccessFactors does not retain all historical HR data.
Here’s what commonly gets lost or trimmed:
| Data Type | Challenge |
|---|---|
| Historical payroll | May not map 1:1 into new schema |
| Performance records | Archived evaluations often missing |
| Audit trails | Some SF reports auto-purge after 48 hrs |
| Employee lifecycle data | Often not imported due to size & formatting |
| Attachments | Limited transfer support for pay slips, forms |
Why does this happen?
- The data structures in SuccessFactors are fundamentally different.
- Not all historical payroll or personnel fields have direct mapping.
- SuccessFactors audit reports often purge automatically after 48 hours.
- Maintaining detailed legacy employee data in SuccessFactors is impractical and sometimes impossible.
Yet, organizations need historical HR and payroll data for:
- Regulatory compliance (e.g., labor laws, tax audits)
- Internal audits and risk management
- Analytics and workforce insights
- Legal disputes or employee history lookups
Why SAP HCM to SuccessFactors Migration Doesn’t Cover All Your HR Data
“Why can’t I just store everything in SuccessFactors?” you ask. It’s tempting to think SuccessFactors can be your single source of truth. But that leads to 3 big problems:
Compliance issues
Most regions require 7–10 years of HR data retention (e.g., India, US, EU, APAC). Failure to retain access to pay slips, exit forms, or attendance can trigger audits or penalties.
Cost overruns
Loading SuccessFactors with legacy records drives up storage and processing costs, especially for documents, PDFs, and tax forms.
System performance
Too much historical data can slow down SuccessFactors dashboards, workflows, and reports.
Migration Tools Aren’t Enough
SAP offers tools like Infoporter to move core data into SuccessFactors. But these solutions:
- Focus mainly on current employee records and organizational data
- Require manual mapping and validation (often through spreadsheets)
- Involve complex, error-prone test cycles
- Can’t fully replicate years of transactional or legacy data
Why You Need a Historical Data Strategy
Trying to lift-and-shift historical HR data into SuccessFactors isn’t viable. But ignoring it altogether is even more risky. You might:
- Breach retention regulations (which often require 5–7+ years of records)
- Be unable to respond to audits or employee legal claims
- Incur ongoing costs from keeping SAP HCM “just for access”
- Undermine your HR analytics capabilities
Instead, what’s needed is a dedicated archiving strategy that works in tandem with your migration.
How ADS Supports SAP HCM to SuccessFactors Migration with Intelligent Archiving
Archon Data Store (ADS) is an AI-powered archive that captures, compresses, and secures all SAP HCM data you choose not to migrate to SuccessFactors.
ADS is purpose-built for regulatory-compliant SAP archival using native SAP ADK and ArchiveLink frameworks. It is designed to ingest and archive large volumes of HR and payroll data from legacy SAP systems, including structured and unstructured content.
Here’s how ADS helps:
Compliance-ready archiving
ADS leverages SAP’s Archive Development Kit (ADK) and ArchiveLink frameworks, ensuring it adheres to SAP’s own standards for decommissioning. It also aligns with the global and regional compliance laws like SOX, GDPR, CCPA, etc. It enables secure retention policies and audit trails across jurisdictions.
Full-spectrum archival of SAP HCM data
ADS is designed to archive 100% of your SAP HCM data, including both structured (payroll tables, employee records) and unstructured content (attachments, scanned forms, audit logs). From pay slips and PF records to grievance forms and tax filings, nothing is left behind.
AI-enriched metadata for fast retrieval
Every record is automatically indexed using intelligent metadata, making it easy for authorized users to search and access — pay slips, contracts, and tax forms — even years after SAP HCM is retired. Even after SAP HCM is decommissioned, HR teams can access historical records through ADS’s intuitive UI or reporting integrations.
Low-cost storage
ADS has built-in storage tiering (hot, warm, cold) which automatically shifts older or infrequently accessed records to lower-cost tiers. This ensures long-term retention remains affordable, scalable, and aligned with your access needs and compliance policies.
Data bunker architecture for long-term security
ADS is built on a data bunker architecture, a secure, and logically isolated environment designed for long-term archival of sensitive HR and payroll records. With encryption at rest and in transit, role-based access, WORM (write-once-read-many) support, and tamper-proof audit logs, your legacy data is protected against unauthorized access, accidental changes, and compliance breaches; even after SAP HCM is fully decommissioned.
Scalable integration with HR & BI systems
ADS supports integration with HR portals, analytics platforms, and reporting tools, allowing archived data to stay connected to your business workflows. Whether it’s for audits, rehiring, or historical analysis, ADS ensures your legacy HR data remains usable, not just stored.
A Practical Implementation Roadmap
To get this right, organizations should follow a combined migration + archival strategy:
- Assess your current SAP HCM data landscape
- Identify what historical data is required for compliance, analytics, and audits
- Configure SuccessFactors for core HR needs going forward
- Deploy ADS to archive historical HR data not migrating to the cloud
- Run test cycles for both migration and archival
- Execute cutover and decommission SAP HCM with confidence
Benefits of Archiving Historical Data During SAP HCM to SuccessFactors Migration
Archiving historical data with ADS alongside your SuccessFactors migration unlocks many key benefits. While SuccessFactors handles your future HR needs, ADS ensures your historical payroll data is just as secure, compliant, and accessible. Together, they create a smarter, leaner HR landscape. Here’s what changes when you archive intelligently:
Stay 100% compliant
- Retain HR and payroll records for 7–10+ years as per regional regulations (e.g., SOX, GDPR, HIPAA)
- Respond confidently to audits, legal inquiries, and labor inspections
- Preserve full employee history for governance and internal review
Cut costs without losing access
- Decommission SAP HCM completely; no need to pay just to “keep the lights on”
- Offload data to low-cost, encrypted storage with intelligent retention policies
- Reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs tied to legacy HR systems
Future-proof your HR strategy
- Keep historical records accessible through modern, searchable interfaces
- Unburden your SuccessFactors environment from legacy bloat
- Enable unified analytics, reporting, and decision-making across both live and archived data
Real-World Results: SAP Data Archival Case Study
A Fortune 500 company saved over $1.3M in storage costs by archiving their SAP HCM data with ADS during their SAP HANA migration.
Archon Data Store helped them:
- Archive business-complete data to avoid storage bloat
- Create a strategic archiving roadmap
- Implement storage tiering for cold data
- Ensure compliance and user access post-decommissioning
Ready to plan your migration and data archival strategy?
Talk to our team about how Archon Data Store (ADS) can help you confidently decommission SAP HCM while preserving access to every critical historical HR record.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Limited scalability for modern workforce needs
- High on-prem maintenance and upgrade costs
- Costly to retain beyond 2027
- Poor support for cloud-native employee experiences
- Not optimized for long-term data retention
Abubacker Malik SH is the AVP of Product at Platform 3 Solutions, where he leads the design and delivery of enterprise-grade products and automation initiatives. With nearly a decade at P3, he has been instrumental in developing Archon, the company’s flagship platform for data archival and application decommissioning.
