This article is intended for SAP project managers, IT architects, and quality assurance leads evaluating how to improve the speed, safety, and accuracy of non-production SAP environments.
The Hidden Cost of Bad SAP Test Data
Every SAP project team knows the feeling: you're deep into a release cycle, your developers are blocked waiting for a valid testing environment, and your QA team is getting faulty results from stale data that hasn't reflected production in weeks. Sound familiar?
SAP environments are notoriously complex. Global enterprises run dozens of interlinked modules: ERP, CRM, HCM, SRM, SCM, ... each with years of customizations. Keeping non-production environments healthy, current, and secure is a perpetual challenge. And the pressure is mounting: mainstream support for SAP ECC 6.0 ends on December 31, 2027 leaving organizations with a hard deadline to migrate to S/4HANA, whether self-hosted, via RISE with SAP or another cloud model. That complexity only grows as migrations accelerate.
The traditional responses to this problem each come with serious drawbacks:
- Full system copy doubles storage requirements, disrupts development for days or weeks, and exposes raw production data, including sensitive personally identifiable data (PII), to a much broader audience than intended.
- Manual data creation is time-consuming, error-prone, and rarely captures the production characteristics needed for meaningful test results.
- Basic replication tools with simple filters (e.g., "last 90 days") lack the relational intelligence to create a truly representative data subset, and often require intermediate staging zones that inflate infrastructure costs even further.
There is a better way.
What Qlik Gold Client Does
Qlik Gold Client (formerly Attunity Gold Client) is a purpose-built SAP test data management solution that gives your project teams surgical control over what data gets copied, where it goes, and how it's protected.
At its core, Gold Client enables intelligent data subsetting: instead of copying everything or writing complex manual scripts, your team defines a subset using any field or attribute: company code, date range, customer segment, transaction type, ... and Gold Client handles the rest. It copies both master data and transactional data while preserving full relational integrity, including the complete document flow (sales order → delivery → billing document → invoice → payment).
Here's what makes it technically distinctive:
1. Intelligent Subsetting with Full Document Flow
Most tools can copy a table. Gold Client understands the SAP data model deeply. When you export a sales order, it knows to pull the delivery notice, billing document, and payment record along with it, automatically. This "full logical unit of work" approach means your test data actually reflects real business scenarios, not orphaned records that break integration tests.
2. Selective Data Deletion and Reset
This is often overlooked but hugely valuable. Gold Client lets you delete specific data from non-production environments without a full rebuild. Load a new month of data, remove the oldest, and keep your test client lean and current. Better yet, your team can reset test data to a known state and rerun the same test scenario repeatedly. Something that's practically impossible without a dedicated tool.
3. Cross-System Data Synchronization
SAP landscapes don't exist in isolation. Gold Client synchronizes data movement across systems: when you export a sales order from ECC, it simultaneously exports the related CRM records. Data masking is also synchronized, the same fields are masked consistently across all relevant systems. This is critical for end-to-end integration testing that actually works.
4. Data Masking for Security and Compliance
Gold Client offers two complementary masking methods:
- Dynamic masking applies masking rules at the point of data copy, so data is protected as it moves from production to non-production environments.
- Static masking applies scrambling rules to a non-production environment that was previously unmasked, anonymizing data already at rest.
This means your non-production environments are safe for broader team access, including external consultants, without compliance risk. And for organizations handling EU citizen data, these capabilities directly support GDPR compliance, including the right to be forgotten.
5. Comprehensive SAP Coverage
Gold Client works across the full SAP application stack: ERP, HCM, CRM, SCM, SRM, GTS, Business Suite on HANA, BW, BW on HANA, and industry-specific solutions. It supports all standard SAP modules plus custom Z tables, with no additional hardware or infrastructure required.
It also includes Data Wave, a scheduling and automation layer built on top of Gold Client's core functionality. In practice, Data Wave allows teams to define recurring, automated data refresh cycles. For example, automatically exporting a delta of updated master data from production every night and importing it into the target non-production environment. This removes the need for manual, ad-hoc copy operations and keeps non-production clients continuously up to date without human intervention.
The Three Use Cases Where Gold Client Shines
Creating Test Data — Building a QA client from scratch, refreshing a development sandbox, or replicating a production issue for troubleshooting. Gold Client creates a data subset that includes SAP master data, in-flight transactional data (active business processes), and historical transactional data. Everything you need for comprehensive testing.
Responding to Business Events — Acquisitions, mergers, divestitures. When a business unit changes hands, IT must extract or integrate SAP data cleanly. Gold Client's precise subsetting capability makes this tractable instead of terrifying.
Migrating to S/4HANA — Before migrating to S/4HANA, teams need to test the operational impact without disrupting the live business. Gold Client allows you to quickly select, protect, and load a representative subset of production data into a pilot S/4HANA environment, whether self-hosted, private cloud, or public cloud, for proof of concepts or cutover testing, while keeping sensitive data masked throughout.
The Business Case
The numbers are compelling. Gold Client enables robust development and testing programs running on as little as 2–5% of overall production data volume. That translates directly into:
- Lower infrastructure costs — smaller non-production environments, less storage
- Faster release cycles — data refreshes are fast (not weeks-long), keeping non-production clients available and current
- Fewer production failures — testing with accurate, current data means fewer surprises at go-live
- Reduced compliance risk — obfuscated non-production data means fewer controls needed on who can access test environments
Leading enterprises across industries, from manufacturing and defense to financial services and consumer goods, have deployed Gold Client to modernize their SAP testing workflows, consistently reporting that it changes what teams thought was possible in the SAP world.
How Does Gold Client Compare to the Alternatives
| SAP TDMS | Data Sync Manager (DSM) | Qlik Gold Client | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | SAP (native) | EPI-USE Labs | Qlik |
| Data subsetting | Yes, but high configuration effort | Yes — 1,000+ predefined business objects | Yes — by any field or attribute |
| Data masking | Basic scrambling only | Yes | Yes — static and dynamic masking |
| Cross-system sync | Limited | Yes | Yes — incl. synchronized masking across systems |
| S/4HANA support | Yes, added later | Yes | Yes — incl. pilot environment loading |
| Automation / scheduling | Limited | Yes | Yes — via Data Wave |
| Ease of setup | Complex, resource-intensive | Simple, fast to implement | Moderate — highly flexible once configured |
| SAP certification | Native SAP product | SAP-certified | SAP-certified |
| Best for | Teams already deep in SAP-native tooling | Standardised landscapes prioritising speed of setup | Complex, multi-module landscapes with strict governance and security requirements |
Where SAP TDMS can be complex to configure and DSM excels in simplicity for standardized landscapes, Qlik Gold Client stands out for organizations that need fine-grained control. Its ability to subset data by any field or attribute, synchronize data movement and masking rules across multiple SAP systems simultaneously, and automate recurring refresh cycles via Data Wave makes it the most flexible and complete solution of the three, particularly for enterprises managing complex, multi-module SAP landscapes under strict GDPR or data security obligations, or in the middle of an S/4HANA migration.
Our Take
From a data architecture and SAP landscape perspective, what impresses us most about Gold Client is that it solves a fundamentally hard problem: replicating a complex, relational, multi-system data landscape, through deep domain knowledge of the SAP data model rather than brute force. The result is test data that behaves like production data, not a pale imitation of it.
For any organization running SAP at scale, struggling with testing bottlenecks, or preparing for a HANA or cloud migration, Qlik Gold Client deserves serious consideration. The productivity gains alone typically justify the investment. The risk reduction is the bonus.
Further Reading
For official product information, visit the Qlik Gold Client product page. For technical documentation and user guides, refer to the Qlik Gold Client Help documentation.
Contact Us
Interested in learning how Qlik Gold Client could fit your SAP environment? Reach out to the element61 team, we'd be happy to walk you through it.
