A queryable, compliance-grade PeopleSoft archive on AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI. Parquet storage at pennies per GB-month, SQL/REST/Parquet access, role-based security with sensitive-field masking, indefinite retention horizon.
Database backups, tape archives, cold storage dumps — none of them serve actual consumers. Cloud archive does.
Traditional PeopleSoft archival meant either keeping a 'lights-on' PeopleSoft instance alive at $400K–$1.2M/year, or taking database backups to cold storage that no one could actually query without a multi-day restore project. Both patterns satisfy the regulatory 'retain the data' requirement on paper while failing the 'access the data' requirement in practice.
The PeopleSoft cloud archive solves both. Data lives in commodity cloud object storage as compressed columnar Parquet — typically 8–15x smaller than the source Oracle database, costing a few thousand dollars per year for multi-TB datasets. Query interfaces (SQL, REST, direct Parquet) serve auditors, regulators, finance analysts, and former employees without any database restore step. Pre-materialized datasets serve the highest-frequency queries in sub-second.
Cloud archive is also forward-compatible. The archive lives in your cloud account, in your storage, accessible to whichever BI and audit tools your organization standardizes on. As your tooling evolves over the 7–15 year retention window, the archive stays accessible — no PeopleSoft-specific tooling required.
Three deployment patterns covering every governance and data-residency requirement we've seen.
Fastest deployment (1–2 weeks), lowest operational burden. Data hosted in Syntra cloud accounts in customer's preferred region. SOC 2 Type II + ISO 27001.
Most common pattern. Data and storage in customer's own AWS/Azure/GCP/OCI account with customer-managed keys. Syntra deploys and operates the query layer via remote control plane.
Full self-hosted. Customer's infrastructure, customer's operations team. Syntra provides software, deployment automation, and L3 support. For customers with strict no-vendor-access policies.
AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, OCI Government. FedRAMP-compatible deployment for Public Sector and defense customers with sovereignty requirements.
Archive data in one cloud (e.g. OCI for Oracle commercial alignment), query via another (e.g. Snowflake on AWS for analytics alignment). For customers with cross-cloud governance.
Fully disconnected deployment for defense and intelligence customers. Air-gapped install, periodic delta updates via approved transfer mechanism.
From scoping to first auditor query. Most cloud archive deployments complete in 6–10 weeks.
Cloud account selection, object storage buckets provisioned, encryption keys generated (KMS or CMK), network paths configured (VPC endpoints, Private Link). IdP integration scoped.
Full PS_* table extract from source PeopleSoft, Parquet conversion with partition design (year/period/BU/ledger), upload to object storage. Hash signatures captured. Manifest files written for auditability.
PSRECDEFN, PSPCMPROG, App Engine, IB service, PSQuery, nVision/SQR/Crystal preserved alongside data. 'System encyclopedia' document drafted.
SQL/REST/Parquet endpoints provisioned. Role-based security configured per consumer profile. Sensitive-field masking rules applied. Audit-log pipeline to SIEM configured.
Trial balance per period per ledger, AP aging per BU, payroll register per period, asset register snapshots, headcount rollups — pre-computed for instant response on common queries.
Auditor, finance, HR consumer testing against archive vs live PeopleSoft. Documentation delivered. Consumer training. PeopleSoft moves to read-only or decommissioned. Archive is now system of record for retention purposes.
Six capabilities that turn 'data preserved' into 'data useful'.
Tableau, Power BI, Cognos, Looker connect via standard JDBC/ODBC to query archive data instantly. No 'restore backup, install PeopleSoft, extract data' workflow.
External auditors run their own SELECT queries against archived PS_LEDGER, PS_VOUCHER, PS_EMPLOYEES with their familiar tooling. Sensitive fields masked, every query logged.
Archived historical PeopleSoft data feeds ML models for fraud detection, revenue prediction, employee attrition modeling — accessible from Spark, Databricks, SageMaker, Vertex AI directly via Parquet.
Join pre-migration PeopleSoft archive with post-migration Fusion live data in a single Snowflake/BigQuery query. 10-year trends span both systems seamlessly.
Targeted preservation, point-in-time freezing, defensible deletion — all native to the cloud archive's immutable-versioning storage layer.
Record-level redaction with audit trail. Erasure requests fulfilled programmatically, with cryptographic proof that the record was permanently removed.
A PeopleSoft cloud archive is a queryable, compliance-grade store of PeopleSoft data — every PS_* table, every customization artifact, every report definition — held in cloud object storage with a managed query interface. It replaces the legacy pattern of keeping a 'lights-on' PeopleSoft instance alive for compliance access. The cloud archive runs on commodity object storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob, GCS, OCI Object Storage) at pennies per GB-month, exposes SQL/REST/Parquet interfaces, applies role-based security with sensitive-field masking, logs every access for audit evidence, and supports retention horizons of 7+ years (SOX/IRS), 6+ years (HIPAA), or indefinite (FERPA student records).
Backups are restore-only — to use them, you have to spin up infrastructure, install PeopleTools, restore the database, and start the app server. That's a multi-day operation that requires PeopleSoft-skilled administrators and full PeopleSoft licensing. A cloud archive is query-ready continuously: an auditor opens a SQL client and runs SELECT in 30 seconds. The archive preserves the same schema and data as the source, plus customization catalog and report definitions, but eliminates the infrastructure and licensing dependency. Cloud archives also include columnar compression (Parquet typically 8–15x smaller than the source Oracle database), partition pruning, and elastic query compute — typically 10–100x faster than restored backups for analytical queries.
All major hyperscalers: AWS (S3 storage, Athena query, optional Glue catalog), Azure (Blob Storage, Synapse Serverless SQL, optional Purview catalog), GCP (Cloud Storage, BigQuery external tables), OCI (Object Storage, Autonomous Database, Analytics Cloud). Customer-managed encryption keys (CMK) supported on all platforms. Multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments supported — for example, archive data in OCI Object Storage but expose query via Snowflake — for customers with cross-cloud governance requirements. Air-gapped and government-cloud deployments (AWS GovCloud, Azure Government) also supported for Public Sector customers.
Very small relative to PeopleSoft operating cost. Typical mid-size PeopleSoft databases run 500GB–2TB. After Parquet compression, archives typically land at 60–150GB. At standard cloud object storage pricing ($0.02–$0.025/GB-month for warm tier), that's $15–$45/month, $180–$540/year. Even multi-TB enterprise archives rarely exceed $5K/year in storage. Query compute is the larger variable cost — typically $200–$2,000/month depending on query volume, with most customers landing in the $500–$1,000/month range. Total annual cost: $5K–$15K vs $400K–$1.2M for keeping live PeopleSoft.
Yes. The archive's columnar Parquet storage plus partition pruning handles billion-row tables natively. Largest archives in production: 3.1B-row PS_JRNL_LN (full-history GL line detail for a global manufacturer), 1.8B-row PS_LEDGER (15 years of monthly balances), 800M-row PS_PAY_EARNINGS (20 years of payroll detail). Typical query response: 2–5 seconds for single-period single-BU queries, 10–30 seconds for multi-year aggregations, with year-end audit datasets pre-materialized for instant response. The archive scales linearly with object storage — no infrastructure capacity planning required.
Not 'real-time' in the operational-database sense — the archive is a system of record for historical/compliance data, not a transactional replacement. But it does support incremental updates: customers still operating PeopleSoft (pre-migration, or in hybrid Campus Solutions scenarios) can configure delta capture (LAST_UPDATE_DTTM watermarks or GoldenGate CDC) so the archive stays within minutes of source. For full-decommission customers, the archive is frozen at decommission date and never updated again — which simplifies the audit story significantly.
Defense in depth. Storage: encryption at rest with KMS-managed keys (or customer-managed keys on request), bucket-level access control, immutable object versioning for audit-tamper-evidence. Network: TLS 1.3 for all access, private endpoints (VPC endpoints / Private Link) for in-cloud access, IP allowlist for external auditor access. Identity: role-based access tied to enterprise IdP via SAML/OIDC, MFA-required for sensitive roles, just-in-time elevation for unmask operations. Audit: every query logged with user, timestamp, query text, rows returned, fields touched — log itself stored immutably and exported to SIEM. Compliance: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA BAA available.
Yes. Deployment options: (1) Syntra-managed SaaS — fastest to deploy, lowest operational overhead. (2) Customer-hosted in customer cloud account — data and storage stay in customer infrastructure, Syntra deploys and operates the query layer remotely. (3) Customer-hosted, customer-operated — full self-hosted, Syntra provides software and support. Most customers choose option 2 (customer cloud account, Syntra-operated) — it satisfies data residency and CMK requirements while keeping operational burden low. All three options are functionally identical from a consumer perspective.
30-minute call. Walk through your cloud preference, data-residency requirements, and retention horizon — leave with a deployment plan and a year-1 cost number.