I am developing a new form and workflow. The workflow has a state machine that includes one or more task actions in each of its states.

The process is fairly long. Today, the life cycle of this process in its legacy solution is at minimum 4 months, but could be up to one year. This has nothing to do with the application, this is just the nature of this particular approval process.

Can a single workflow instance that is running a state machine stay active for that long?

Should I be concerned with the workflow suspending due to it running for so long?