keeping "Obsolete" SAP systems alive for regulary

[MAUS]

Hi,

Due to all kinds of global re-implementation projects, we end up having various (old) obsolete SAP systems (mostly R/3 3.1, 4.0 and 4.6) which we need to keep up&running for regulary reasons (tax, customs, etc). We see this is a issue for the future. Because a few of these systems are no longer being supported by SAP or any other ISV (operating system, RDBMS, etc); however we need to keep them alive for auditors etc.

We had discussions with SAP about archiving the systems off, however SAP does not recommend the SAP Archiving solution to be used for systems decommisioning.

Are there more companies facing this project and what are the plans of controlling this?