A queryable, compliance-grade Unit4 cloud archive on AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI. Parquet storage at pennies per GB-month, retention tiering, SQL/REST/Parquet access, role-based security with masking. Eliminate the £200K–£800K annual cost of keeping Agresso alive for compliance access.
SQL Server backups, tape archives, cold storage dumps, 'we'll keep Agresso running for compliance' — none of them actually serve consumers. The Unit4 cloud archive does, at a fraction of the cost.
Traditional Unit4 archival meant either keeping a 'lights-on' Business World / Agresso instance alive at £200K–£800K per year of SQL Server, Windows, .NET, Unit4 support, DBAs, and infrastructure, or taking SQL Server database backups to cold storage that no one could actually query without a multi-day restore project — and only then if the Agresso version, .NET runtime, and SQL Server version still matched and a skilled Agresso admin was still on payroll. Both patterns satisfy the regulatory 'retain the data' requirement on paper while failing the 'access the data' requirement in practice.
The Syntra ETL Unit4 cloud archive solves both. Data lives in commodity cloud object storage as compressed columnar Parquet — typically 8–15x smaller than the source Unit4 SQL Server database, costing a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per year for multi-TB datasets. Query interfaces (SQL, REST, direct Parquet) serve finance teams, faculty deans, auditors, regulators, and former employees without any database restore step. Retention tiering pushes long-tail historical periods to archive-tier storage at $0.004/GB-month while keeping the most-queried recent periods on hot tier for sub-second response.
The Unit4 cloud archive is also forward-compatible. The archive lives in your cloud account, in your storage, accessible to whichever BI and audit tools your organisation standardises on — Power BI today, Snowflake or Databricks in three years, something not yet invented in seven. As tooling evolves over the 10–15 year retention window, the archive stays accessible — no Agresso-specific tooling required, no Unit4 contract dependency, no SQL Server upgrade cycle.
Three deployment patterns plus regional variants — covering every UK / EU / Nordic governance and data-residency requirement we have seen.
Fastest deployment (1–2 weeks). Data hosted in Syntra cloud accounts in customer's preferred region (UK / EU / Nordic / US). Lowest operational overhead. SOC 2 Type II + ISO 27001 + UK Cyber Essentials.
Most common pattern for UK HE and EU customers. 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.
Fully self-hosted. Customer's infrastructure, customer's operations team. Syntra provides software, deployment automation, and L3 support. For Public Sector customers with strict no-vendor-access policies.
AWS London (eu-west-2), Azure UK South, OCI London, AWS Dublin / Frankfurt, Azure North Europe / West Europe. Satisfies UK GDPR and EU data residency requirements for HE and public-sector customers.
Azure Sweden Central, OCI Stockholm, AWS Stockholm — in-country residency for Swedish kommun, Norwegian fylke, Danish region, Finnish maakunta customers with Nordic public-sector data-residency obligations.
AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, OCI Government — FedRAMP-compatible for US Public Sector / defence. Air-gapped variants for defence / intelligence customers with no-internet sovereignty requirements.
From scoping to first finance query against the archive. Most Unit4 cloud archive deployments complete in 6–10 weeks, in parallel with the Unit4 to Fusion migration.
Cloud account selection (AWS / Azure / GCP / OCI), region selection per residency requirement, object storage buckets provisioned, encryption keys generated (KMS or CMK), retention-tiering lifecycle rules configured, network paths set up (VPC endpoints / Private Link). IdP integration scoped — Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Ping, or Shibboleth for HE.
Full extract from the source Unit4 SQL Server database — acrtransact, acrbatch, customer, supplier, project, wbs, employee, timesheet, expenseclaim, apvoucher, ardocument, asset register, gltrans, payroll. Parquet conversion with partition design (year / period / BU / project). Upload to object storage. Hash signatures captured. Manifest files written for auditability.
AIB report definitions, Excelerator template store, Browser Flow registry, Flexi-Field definitions, Coda book structures preserved alongside data. Seven-series coding-structure relations and reference data archived. 'Unit4 system encyclopedia' document drafted summarising the customisation footprint.
SQL/REST/Parquet endpoints provisioned. Role-based security configured per consumer profile (finance, faculty dean, auditor, registry, ex-employee, research office). Sensitive-field masking rules applied (NI, bank, salary, grant amounts, student identifiers). Audit-log pipeline configured to customer SIEM.
Lifecycle rules activated — recent periods on hot tier, mid-age on cool tier, long-tail on archive tier. Pre-materialised datasets computed: trial balance per period per ledger, faculty cost-centre rollups, AP aging per supplier, project actuals by WBS, HESA-return shape, REF cost capture, payroll register per period.
Finance, faculty, audit, registry consumer testing against archive vs live Business World. Documentation delivered. Consumer training. Business World moves to read-only or fully decommissioned. Archive is now the production answer for Unit4 historical access — Agresso infrastructure can be retired and Unit4 support contract terminated.
Real numbers from a typical mid-size Unit4 / Agresso post-migration scenario, annualised over a 10-year retention window.
Before: £80K–£300K per year (typically 18–22% of original Unit4 licence fee, often inflating annually). After: £0. Unit4 support contract terminated at next renewal.
Before: £40K–£200K per year (SQL Server Enterprise on Business World DB tier, often with SA / Software Assurance). After: £0. SQL Server licences released or reallocated to other workloads.
Before: £30K–£150K per year (Windows Server, .NET app tier, web tier, dev / test / DR environments). After: £0. Infrastructure decommissioned or reclaimed.
Before: £80K–£250K per year (Agresso administrator, SQL Server DBA, .NET app admin, security admin time). After: £0–£15K per year (light-touch archive admin).
Before: 4–10 person-weeks per year (Unit4 patches, SQL Server CUs, Windows monthly cycle, .NET framework upgrades, Agresso version upgrades every 2–3 years). After: £0. The archive has no patch cycle.
Before: £0 (no archive existed). After: $5K–$15K per year for typical mid-size deployment (cloud object storage + retention tiering + query layer + access management). Net saving £150K–£700K per year.
The Unit4 cloud archive is a queryable, compliance-grade store of Unit4 data — every Business World (Agresso) and ERPx table, every Coda Financials book, every customisation artefact (AIB report, Excelerator template, Browser Flow, Flexi-Field definition) — held in cloud object storage with a managed query interface. It replaces the legacy pattern of keeping a 'lights-on' Agresso instance alive for compliance access. The Unit4 cloud archive runs on commodity object storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage, 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 (UK FOI floor, HMRC payroll), 10–15 years (HESA-aligned higher-ed), or indefinite (REF and certain research-grant evidence).
SQL Server backups are restore-only — to use them an organisation has to spin up a SQL Server instance, install the matching Unit4 / Agresso version, restore the database, and start the Business World application tier. That is a multi-day operation that requires Agresso-skilled administrators and a Unit4 licence. The Unit4 cloud archive is query-ready continuously: a finance analyst opens Excel via ODBC and runs SELECT in 30 seconds. The archive preserves the same schema and data as Business World, plus the customisation catalogue (AIB / Excelerator / Browser Flow / Flexi-Field definitions) and report library, but eliminates the SQL Server, application tier, and Unit4 licence dependencies. Cloud archives also include columnar compression — Parquet is typically 8–15x smaller than the source Unit4 SQL Server database — and elastic query compute, so analytics queries are 10–100x faster than restored backups.
The cost delta is the headline of the product. A mid-size Business World / Agresso instance kept running purely for compliance access costs £200K–£800K per year all-in: Unit4 / Agresso support contract (often 18–22% of original licence fee), Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise licensing on the database tier, Windows Server and .NET application tier licensing, 1–2 Agresso administrators plus part-time SQL Server DBA, infrastructure (compute + storage + network + DR + backup), Microsoft and Unit4 patching effort, and the periodic capital cost of refreshing aging on-prem hardware. The Syntra cloud archive replaces all of this with cloud object storage at pennies per GB-month plus a thin query layer — typically $5K–$15K per year for a mid-size Unit4 archive. Net saving: £150K–£700K per year, every year, compounding over the 10–15 year retention window.
All major hyperscalers: AWS (S3 storage, Athena query, optional Glue catalog), Azure (Blob Storage, Synapse Serverless SQL — popular with UK HE customers on the Microsoft side), Google Cloud (Cloud Storage, BigQuery external tables), Oracle Cloud (OCI Object Storage, Autonomous Database, Analytics Cloud). Customer-managed encryption keys (CMK) supported on all platforms. Data residency: UK customers typically choose AWS London (eu-west-2), Azure UK South, or OCI London. EU customers choose Frankfurt, Dublin, Stockholm, or equivalent. Nordic public-sector customers can choose Azure Sweden Central or OCI Stockholm for in-country residency. Government-cloud deployments (AWS GovCloud, Azure Government) supported for sensitive Public Sector customers. Multi-cloud deployments — for example archive in OCI for Oracle commercial alignment, query via Snowflake on Azure for analytics alignment — supported for cross-cloud governance.
Yes. The archive's columnar Parquet storage plus partition pruning handles billion-row tables natively. Largest Unit4 archives in production: 2.4B-row acrtransact (20 years of GL line detail for a UK university group with multiple subsidiaries), 1.1B-row project actuals (15 years of professional-services project history), 600M-row timesheet (10 years of services-firm time entry detail), 250M-row acrpayroll (multi-decade payroll history for a Nordic public-sector consolidation). Typical query response: 2–5 seconds for single-period single-BU queries, 10–30 seconds for multi-year cross-faculty aggregations, with HESA-return and year-end audit datasets pre-materialised for instant response. The archive scales linearly with object storage — no SQL Server capacity planning required.
Yes, and it is the default deployment pattern. The archive uses storage-tier lifecycle policies to balance cost and access speed. Recent periods (most-recent 2–3 fiscal years) sit on standard / hot object storage tier for sub-second query response — these are the periods auditors and finance teams query most. Mid-age periods (years 4–7) sit on infrequent-access / cool tier, slightly higher per-query cost but still fast. Long-tail periods (years 8+) sit on cold / archive tier (S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, Azure Cool, GCS Coldline) for cheapest storage — typically $0.004–$0.012/GB-month — with query latency still acceptable for occasional FOI or REF retrieval. Retention-tiering rules are configurable per data domain: GL data might tier differently from research-grant evidence, which might tier differently from payroll. Lifecycle transitions run automatically.
Defence in depth. Storage: encryption at rest with KMS-managed keys (customer-managed keys on request for HE customers with sovereignty requirements), bucket-level access control, immutable object versioning for audit-tamper-evidence. Network: TLS 1.3 for all access, private endpoints (VPC endpoints / Private Link / OCI Service Gateway) for in-cloud access, IP allowlist for external auditor access including UK NAO and HE regulator endpoints. Identity: role-based access tied to enterprise IdP via SAML/OIDC (works with Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Ping, Shibboleth for UK HE), 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-aligned, UK Cyber Essentials, HIPAA BAA where US healthcare entities are involved.
Both, plus a self-hosted variant. (1) Syntra-managed SaaS — fastest to deploy, lowest operational overhead, data hosted in Syntra cloud accounts in the customer's preferred region. (2) Customer-hosted, Syntra-operated — data and storage live in the customer's own AWS / Azure / GCP / OCI account with customer-managed keys; Syntra deploys and operates the query layer remotely via control plane. This is the most common pattern for UK HE and public-sector customers because it satisfies data residency and sovereignty requirements while keeping operational burden low. (3) Customer-hosted, customer-operated — fully self-hosted, Syntra provides software, deployment automation, and L3 support. For Public Sector customers with strict no-vendor-access policies. All three options are functionally identical from a consumer perspective — same SQL/REST/Parquet interfaces, same security model, same read-log.
30-minute call. Walk through your Unit4 footprint (Business World, ERPx, Coda), cloud preference, UK / EU / Nordic residency requirements, retention horizon, and current Agresso operating cost — leave with a deployment plan, a year-1 cost number, and a 10-year saving projection.