Sage People Data Archival for Compliance and Cost Control

Sage People data archival is the process of moving historical HR data, terminated employee records, closed leave requests, and historical payroll integration data out of the operational Sage People Salesforce org into a queryable long-term cloud archive. Organizations archive Sage People data for three reasons. Salesforce Platform storage costs — Sage People orgs accumulate millions of Worker__c history records, Leave_Request__c entries, and Salary__c versions, and Salesforce storage allocation is expensive past the included quota. Compliance retention — UK GDPR 6+ year HR record retention, HMRC payroll 7 years, ICO right-to-erasure obligations that need an archive exemption framework. Migration prep — a smaller production Salesforce footprint is faster, cheaper, and less risky to migrate to Fusion. Syntra ETL routes cold data to cloud Parquet, leaves access stubs in Sage People if needed, and exposes a SQL/REST query interface for HR ops and auditors.

UK GDPR / Data Protection Act 2018 sets the baseline for UK-based Sage People customers: HR records should generally be retained for 6 years post-termination to cover potential tribunal claims, with payroll records retained 6 years for HMRC purposes (with some classes — gender pay gap, equality monitoring — retained longer). EU GDPR varies by member state, typically 5–10 years. US customers under FLSA and ADEA face 3-year minimums extending to 7+ years for federal contractors. Healthcare-sector Sage People customers retain under HIPAA at 6 years minimum. Pension and auto-enrolment records: typically retained for the lifetime of the worker plus 6 years under TPR guidance. Syntra ETL's archival policies are configurable per data class so each retention regime is satisfied without overpaying to keep everything.

Yes. The Sage People data archival path preserves the Salesforce custom-object schema — object names (Worker__c, Salary__c, Leave_Request__c), field API names, data types, picklist values, lookup relationships — in the archive. Archived data lives as Parquet with embedded schema plus a JSON Schema sidecar generated from the Salesforce Metadata API. The archive query interface lets HR ops and auditors run familiar SELECT statements against Worker__c, Salary__c, Leave_Request__c and so on, returning results that match what they would have seen in the live Sage People org — including custom fields your admins added, effective-dating, and the full Sage People business context. No translation, no schema flattening.

Yes, with the standard caveats. UK GDPR (and EU GDPR) right-to-erasure applies to personal data the controller no longer has a lawful basis to retain. Archived HR data is typically retained on a legitimate-interests basis (potential tribunal claims) and a legal-obligation basis (HMRC, pension regulation) for the statutory retention period. Erasure requests during that period can be lawfully refused, but the data subject must be informed. After the retention period, the archive supports targeted erasure: a specific Worker__c record and all related Employment_Record__c, Salary__c, Leave_Request__c rows can be erased on signed authorisation. Erasure events are themselves logged (paradoxically, you keep an audit trail of the erasure) per ICO guidance. The archive exposes a documented DSAR (Data Subject Access Request) endpoint for the access-request side of GDPR.

Yes, for organizations that have migrated to a new HCM (Oracle Fusion, Workday) and no longer need operational Sage People. The Syntra archive holds the complete worker data, the customization catalog (Apex, Flow, custom fields, validation rules), the security model snapshot, and the reporting library — everything an auditor or HMRC would otherwise demand a live Salesforce org for. Customers save 60–85% on Salesforce Platform licence costs (Sage People per-user licensing), Sage People support fees, MuleSoft or integration tier costs, and Salesforce storage overage. The archive query interface satisfies UK GDPR, HMRC, FLSA, and HIPAA access requirements for the full retention window.

Role-based access with mandatory audit logging. Every query against the archive is logged with user, timestamp, query text, rows returned, sensitive fields accessed. Archive data is encrypted at rest with KMS-managed keys, in transit with TLS 1.3. Sensitive HCM fields (Salary__c.Annual_Salary__c, National Insurance Number, bank account, date of birth) are masked by default and require explicit role permission to unmask. Different role tiers for HR ops (full read), payroll team (payroll-only fields), auditors (read-only with audit-log access), ex-employees (DSAR portal access to own records only). Integration with your corporate IdP (Azure AD, Okta) via SAML or OIDC for single sign-on.

Order-of-magnitude cheaper at scale. A live Sage People org for a 5,000-employee company typically runs £20-50 per user per month for the Sage People licence (the Salesforce Platform licence is bundled), so £1.2M-3.0M per year — plus storage overage if you've accumulated millions of history records (£500-2,000/month), plus integration tier costs (MuleSoft Anypoint can run £100K+/year), plus internal Salesforce admin time. The Syntra archive replaces all of that with cloud object storage at pennies per GB-month plus the archive query service licence. Customers typically see total cost drop from £1.5M+/year to £80-150K/year — a 90% saving.

Yes. The archive exposes a standard SQL interface (JDBC/ODBC), so Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Qlik, Alteryx, ACL, IDEA, and similar tools connect with no modification. A REST API supports programmatic access. The underlying Parquet files can be queried directly from Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, or Spark for warehouse-native access. Standard auditor and HR analytics extracts (active headcount by department over time, salary band distribution, leave utilization trends, manager span-of-control history) ship as pre-built saved queries. UK HMRC-specific extracts (P11D inputs, RTI submission history) are also pre-built.