You have a retail business of clothes. Parker bought a pair of jeans 10 years ago, and you have added that information to your database. In that period, he moved to different states or even to a different country. Also, those jeans might not even fit him, and he doesn't own them anymore. So you can say that the information you have gathered has negligible value to your business when you compare it to the risk of losing that data to hackers.
So, the same happens with IT managers. They are in a dilemma about what data to keep and what not to. Usually, data is retained based on the data type, and it is subjective to your business needs.
So, an IT consulting firm will bring some sanity to your data management and follow a data retention policy that you can implement across all the enterprise systems.
A data retention policy is an official protocol for retaining information for running needs. It clarifies what data should be stored or archived and for how long.
When the retention period of your data set completes, it is disposed of or moved to secondary storage that depends on your business needs.
While writing a data retention policy, you should determine how to organize information so it can be searched and analyzed later and destroy the information that is no longer needed. It also outlines the specific reasons for retaining data and when targeting it for disposal.
The policy allows businesses to manage their compliance with industry regulations and guidelines. It avoids criminal or financial penalties stemming from non-compliance.
Consistently remove duplicate and outdated data. It makes it easier to find relevant information when you are browsing through your data retention policy.
With this policy, your business doesn't need to retain data that is no longer needed. It frees up your storage space and makes space for your new data. The entire process can increase speed and cause low storage costs.
Every enterprise's requirements are different when it comes to creating a data retention policy. However, there are several best data security practices organizations should stick to while creating policy. Some of them are:
Organizations should determine the laws and regulations that rule the retention needs so those can be integrated into data retention policy.
When you create a retention policy, it involves more than just complying with applicable regulations. It also takes the business needs into account. The operational requirements that command retaining data for longer than is needed.
Some data are more valuable than others. Avoid crafting a blanket data retention policy that applies to all data types. Verify all the coming requests with a zero-trust security solution and define the type of data. The policy should retain and set up requirements for each type.
If the enterprise is involved in any legal action, it will likely need to stop the data lifecycle process. This is because the data was subpoenaed, and it won't be deleted automatically once it reaches the end of the period.
If an organization is putting through regulatory compliance, it is likely to document its data retention needs to satisfy the regulatory orders. It is a formally written document that is filled with legal idioms. Consider drafting a simple version of a document that you can use internally as a way of helping stakeholders in the organization.
A common disaster recovery practice is to store a copy of data in case the original gets lost due to system failure or accidental deletion. Modern businesses need to consider data backup as a part of the overall data retention strategy that is a backup retention policy.
A backup as a service includes the retention period of data, access, and encryption while weighing privacy and legal concern that is against the economy and concern.
Our firm is a platform that managed cloud services and protects the enterprise backup data across the cloud center and workloads. It is built on AWS that gives you predictable storage costs with no egress charges.