Industry: Banking and Financial Services
Region: North America
Business Driver: Prevent uncontrolled attachment growth in SAP HANA while preserving compliant document access
Overview
A regional bank with $18B in assets and 240 branches identified uncontrolled attachment growth during its S/4HANA migration planning.
Business users across loan processing, onboarding, procurement, and HR operations were uploading high volumes of documents such as KYC records, invoices, loan agreements, and compliance files through SAP applications.
Although the bank had implemented an external repository, attachments continued to accumulate inside SAP HANA due to default SAP storage behavior. As a result, attachment data in tables such as SOFFCONT1 grew to 2.1 TB, significantly increasing the overall HANA footprint.
The challenge was not just historical data growth, but separating unstructured attachment storage from SAP transactional processing without disrupting business access.
Challenges
- Attachments originating from SAP GUI, Fiori, and mobile applications continuing to default into SAP HANA despite an external repository
- SOFFCONT1 table growing at 38% annually due to uncontrolled attachment ingestion
- High-volume documents such as KYC records, invoices, and loan files consuming expensive HANA memory despite no in-memory requirement
- Existing cleanup approaches risking broken linkage between attachments and SAP business records
- Attachment-heavy transactions causing increased latency and longer backup cycles
- Regulatory retention requirements of 7 to 15 years preventing direct deletion of historical data
Business Requirements
- Prevent future attachment binaries from being stored inside SAP HANA irrespective of upload source
- Externalize attachments originating from SAP GUI, Fiori, and mobile applications into a governed archive repository
- Migrate existing SOFFCONT1 data without breaking linkage to SAP business data
- Preserve seamless document retrieval within existing SAP and Fiori workflows
- Enforce retention, governance, and legal hold policies for regulated documents
- Reduce long-term HANA growth before S/4HANA migration
Solution
The bank implemented a two-phase attachment management strategy using Archon Data Store.
The first phase focused on stopping future attachment growth inside HANA. System-level controls ensured that attachment binaries originating from SAP GUI, Fiori, and mobile applications were externalized and governed within ADS instead of being stored within SAP tables, establishing ADS as the governed archive repository outside HANA and removing dependency on end-user compliance.
The second phase addressed historical attachment data residing in SOFFCONT1 and external repositories connected to the SAP landscape. Attachments and metadata were archived and migrated into ADS while preserving referential linkage to structured SAP records such as loan accounts, invoices, employee data, and procurement documents.
Attachments were stored in ADS in a compressed, indexed format optimized for governance and retrieval, while SAP HANA remained focused on transactional processing. SAP ArchiveLink integration ensured transparent document access through existing SAP and Fiori workflows.
Retention and legal hold policies were enforced within ADS without impacting user experience.
Business Outcomes
If uncontrolled attachment growth is increasing SAP HANA costs and creating governance challenges, ADS helps archive and externalize SAP attachment storage while preserving secure, compliant access through SAP and Fiori applications.
Assess your SOFFCONT1 footprint and implement a controlled attachment archiving strategy aligned with your S/4HANA modernization initiatives.
