UKG Pro + Ready Cloud Archive — Parquet, Tiered, Queryable

The Syntra ETL ukg pro + ready cloud archive is a purpose-built archive product that holds your historical UKG Pro and UKG Ready data as Parquet files on cloud object storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage) with tiered storage policies, indexed query access, hash-signed evidence chains and a self-serve reporting layer. It is not a backup product, not a generic data lake, and not a SaaS subscription that runs in someone else's cloud. The archive lives in your cloud tenant under your governance, with full control over encryption keys, retention policies, access logs and decommissioning rules. The Syntra ETL product handles the extract, conversion, indexing and reporting layer; the storage and security perimeter remain yours.

Parquet is the right format for long-tail historical data: columnar, compressed (typically 5–10x compression versus raw JSON), efficient for analytical queries, and supported natively by every modern query engine (Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, Spark, Trino, DuckDB). Object storage (S3, Azure Blob, GCS) gives durable, low-cost storage with tiered pricing — hot/warm/cold tiers that drop 80–90% versus keeping data in UKG. The combination is the canonical pattern for regulated long-term archives: durable, queryable, cheap and portable. The Syntra ETL ukg pro + ready cloud archive structures the Parquet partitions specifically for UKG's data shape and the query patterns regulators and auditors actually use.

Tier assignments are driven by both calendar age and observed access patterns. The default policy: data from the last 18 months stays in the hot tier (S3 Standard, Azure Hot Blob, GCS Standard) for sub-second query latency; data from 18–60 months moves to the warm tier (S3 Standard-IA, Azure Cool, GCS Nearline) for tens-of-seconds latency at significantly lower storage cost; data older than 60 months moves to the cold tier (S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, Azure Cool/Archive, GCS Coldline) for minutes-of-latency at the lowest storage tier. Frequently queried periods (e.g., a fiscal year under SEC review) are auto-promoted to the hot tier. The result: a multi-TB archive at 10–20% of the storage cost of equivalent UKG retention.

Customer cloud. The Syntra ETL ukg pro + ready cloud archive deploys into your AWS, Azure or Google Cloud tenant under your governance, with full control over encryption keys (BYOK against AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, GCP KMS), VPC/VNET network isolation, IAM roles, retention policies, audit logs and decommissioning rules. Syntra ETL operates the extract orchestration, conversion engine and reporting layer; you retain the storage, security perimeter and key custody. This satisfies the data-residency, sovereignty and security-controls requirements that regulated enterprises (financial services, healthcare, federal/state government, defence) cannot compromise on.

The worker self-service portal queries the cloud archive directly through the Syntra ETL reporting layer. Ex-employees authenticate (worker-id + SSN-4 + DOB + termination date) and download their own W-2s, pay statements and ACA 1095-C forms. The portal supports multi-year retrieval up to the full retention window — typically 7 years for IRS Pub 15 / W-2 plus longer for ACA — without inflating the active-worker count or PEPM bill in UKG. Worker self-service access is logged with the same audit-grade rigour as enterprise queries: requesting identity, records returned, response hash. This is the operational pattern that lets the UKG tenant terminate at the next renewal anniversary.

Yes. Parquet on object storage is a first-class data source for every modern query engine. The Syntra ETL ukg pro + ready cloud archive partitions Parquet by fiscal year and legal entity, registers the schema in the relevant catalog (AWS Glue, Snowflake external table, BigQuery external table, Databricks Unity Catalog), and exposes both the indexed query path (through the Syntra ETL reporting product) and the open data path (through whatever analytical warehouse your team already uses). This is critical for the blended-analytics use case: multi-year headcount, turnover or pay-equity analyses that span the UKG archive years and the post-cutover Oracle Fusion HCM years.

All Parquet partitions and PDF documents are encrypted at rest under customer-managed keys (BYOK against AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault or GCP KMS). Transport encryption is TLS 1.2+ end-to-end. Read access is gated by IAM roles bound to the corporate IdP via single sign-on. Hash-signed manifests are signed under a separate KMS key reserved for evidence integrity. The result: the customer retains full custody of both data encryption and evidence integrity keys; revoking access to either renders the archive unreadable. This satisfies the key-custody requirements that financial-services, healthcare and federal customers cannot delegate.

Litigation hold is a configurable retention policy at the worker level or the time-window level: a hold flag on a worker prevents any cold-tier expiration or deletion of any record tied to that worker, regardless of the broader retention rule; a hold flag on a time window does the same for all records in that period. Holds are auditable and time-stamped, integrated with the corporate eDiscovery workflow (Relativity, Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, Logikcull where customers use them). eDiscovery search runs against the archive's indexed dimensions (worker-id, pay-period, document-type) with manifest-signed output ready for legal-hold custodian review. The same mechanism handles regulatory holds (IRS audit hold, ERISA examination hold, OFCCP audit hold).