Data Lifecycle Management for Oracle EBS

Oracle Enterprise Business Suite (EBS) is used by thousands of enterprise customers around the world, with applications ranging from enterprise resource planning (ERP) to customer relationship management (CRM). While this rich array of software is tremendously useful, the complexity of your Oracle EBS environment can quickly become overwhelming if you don’t actively work to manage it.

Below, we’ll discuss one of the most pressing concerns for Oracle EBS: data lifecycle management (DLM). If you’re not careful, the size of your Oracle EBS environment can quickly swell, increasing your IT expenses and slowing down the system’s performance. Data lifecycle management for Oracle EBS is an essential practice that can slim down the size of your EBS footprint while preserving access to data for the users who need it.

The 4 Stages of Data Lifecycle Management

Every piece of data that your organization handles is located at a particular stage in the enterprise data lifecycle. The 4 basic stages of data lifecycle management are:

• Creation: First, data is created and/or collected. For example, you might acquire data from a third party, manually create it with data entry, or observe it with a given tool, process, or sensor.
• Storage: Data that is useful long-term needs to be securely stored and backed up on a regular basis. However, this need for secure storage also must be balanced with the ability to easily view, modify, and analyze the data.
• Archival: Information that is no longer used, or used only infrequently, should be archived in a separate location. Archiving files helps limit the data bloat of your Oracle EBS footprint, while also ensuring compliance with the necessary standards and regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA.
• Deletion: Once data is no longer useful, and no longer subject to regulatory compliance, it can be safely deleted. In particular, sensitive and confidential information must be handled with care and properly wiped so that it’s not exposed to a third party.

How to Practice Data Lifecycle Management for Oracle EBS

The data lifecycle management stages listed above are ideal for any organization that relies heavily on its enterprise data (and these days, that’s pretty much all of them). Unfortunately, far too many businesses aren’t able to achieve a fluid, efficient DLM process for their enterprise data—whether that’s due to organizational inertia or lack of in-house technical expertise.

However, practicing good data lifecycle management for Oracle EBS is a must. By archiving and deleting the data you use infrequently or not at all, you’ll have less information in your EBS deployment to manage. This has several advantages: you’ll no longer be replicating unused data when cloning a new EBS environment, and your reports and analyses will speed up significantly.

A few data lifecycle management best practices for Oracle EBS include:

• Understand the data you collect: Oracle EBS databases are capable of storing a wide variety of information, from customer records to accounting spreadsheets. Each type of data, and the database in which it’s stored, may also have separate concerns regarding regulatory compliance and data privacy. The first step in data lifecycle management for Oracle EBS is understanding exactly what type of information you have on hand and how it needs to be managed.
• Have a backup and business continuity plan: While archiving data is a best practice for the information you rarely use anymore, the data you use on a daily basis should be backed up on a regular basis to help preserve business continuity. On-premises backups are perhaps easiest, but they’re also at risk in the event of an on-site natural disaster. Cloud backups securely replicate your files on multiple servers and can easily scale up as the amount of your enterprise data increases.

Working with a third-party managed services provider can help with DLM—but you’ll need to choose the right one. Your choice of Oracle EBS MSP should be familiar with your business goals and requirements so that they can help advise you about which data to preserve and how to preserve it.

Conclusion

By applying data lifecycle management best practices for Oracle EBS, you can make your enterprise IT significantly less complicated, while also improving performance and slashing costs. However, DLM is just one of the many IT challenges that Oracle EBS users need to address.

As an Oracle Platinum Partner, Datavail has many years of experience helping our clients manage and maintain their Oracle EBS deployments. To learn more about the complexities of using Oracle EBS, and how you can take steps to resolve them, check out our white paper The Top 6 Challenges of Managing Oracle EBS Environments.