Data Retention and Archiving

A company’s data retention policy should include regulations and must comply with security measures in place to protect the information while it is retained, instructions for destroying data once the retention period has passed and procedures to follow after a breach. It should also make clear how a company handles requests from customers to delete their personal information.

Archiving is the process of storing data for a long period of time.

Archiving is the process of safely preserving inactive information in digital and paper formats that you don’t use on a daily basis for long-term retention. This can include legacy data, regulatory compliance records, historical data, and backup resources. It differs from backup, which is the process of creating a copy of your production data and storing it in another location.

A comprehensive data archiving strategy can help you reduce storage costs, improve document security and manage ediscovery requests. It can also help you maintain business continuity in the event of disaster, and ensure that your organization can meet its legal and regulatory obligations. It is important to develop a clear data retention policy, which should be based on your business needs.

Without a centralized data archive, your company’s intellectual property is scattered across servers, devices, PST files and employees’ personal devices. This makes it difficult to find the right information when needed and can lead to compliance and ediscovery issues. An archive solution with granular retention policies allows you to create a clear, centralized repository for all your company’s information. This can make it easier to access the right information, and save you money by eliminating redundant data. In addition, a data archiving system can minimize storage costs by placing older data on less expensive storage tiers.

Archiving is the process of storing data in a secure environment.

Data archiving is a process of preserving records by moving them from active use to storage that’s designed to be more accessible. It allows businesses to comply with legal requirements, reduce the cost of storing data, improve business intelligence and protect against lawsuits.

A good data retention policy should be clear and easy to understand by all teams. It should also be regularly reassessed as laws change and your company’s needs evolve. Keeping your policies current will make it easier to comply with new requirements and mitigate risk in the event of a breach or audit.

Backups are a copy of data that could be used to restore operations in the event of an emergency or disaster. Archives are long-term data storage, whereas backups are designed for quick recovery and often get overwritten or destroyed on a regular basis. In addition to reducing costs, archiving also improves the performance of your systems by moving inactive data to cheaper storage and freeing up space on expensive primary storage sites. Look for an archive data software solution that offers flexible access controls so you can assign user roles and permissions to different groups of employees. This will allow you to limit employee self-service and make sure that your compliance, legal and IT departments have full control of the platform.

Archiving is the process of storing data in a format that can be accessed in the future.

A data retention scheme is a set of policies that determine how long an organization’s data will be stored, and how it will be retrieved from the archive when required. It also outlines a timeline for destroying the data, so that the organization doesn’t run afoul of laws and regulations governing the storage of certain types of information.

The biggest reason to establish a data retention policy is compliance with industry standards and government legislation relating to the storage of sensitive records such as emails. These regulations impose strict guidelines about which data must be stored, how long it must be kept and who has access to it. Failing to meet these stipulations can result in severe civil and criminal penalties.

The other reason to archive data is to reduce the cost of primary storage. Archive storage is typically based on low-performance, high-capacity storage media such as optical or tape. It is less expensive than primary storage because it does not have to provide high levels of IOPS (input/output operations per second) that are needed for read and write activity. Often, a dedicated data archiving software application will be used to automate the process of moving aging files to archive storage. This software can also provide features such as data deduplication and superior performance, which improves backup and recovery efficiency.