A company's data retention policy dictates not just how the company stores data for purposes of compliance or regulation but also how the company gets rid of data after it is no longer needed. Learn Best Practices to establish a good Data Retention Policy.
According to some reports, data has a value that exceeds that of oil, making it one of the most precious resources in the world at present. Since then, data has become extremely valuable to businesses of all types and a prime target for cybercriminals. There are several rules and regulations in place to protect the astronomical amounts of data that businesses acquire every day (up to 7.5 septillion gigabytes); therefore, it's crucial that your company establish and strictly adhere to strict data retention policies.
A company's data retention policy dictates not just how the company stores data for purposes of compliance or regulation but also how the company gets rid of data after it is no longer needed. Data Retention Policies also establish how Data Recovery and Backup solutions work within an organization.
No matter how minimal, a data retention policy should detail the required structure and type of documents and data, the time they should be retained, and the mediums in which they are stored. Generally, these criteria will be based on the regulations set forth by whichever authority regulates the relevant industry.
The scope, location, and duration of data storage and archival are all key considerations in the data retention policy. When the retention time term for a certain data set has passed, the original data in question can either be destroyed or relocated as historical records to secondary or tertiary storage, depending on the needs that have been defined. As a result, the organization will maintain compliance while preserving the primary storage's integrity.
Organizations often create their own data retention policies, but they must also ensure that these policies satisfy or exceed all legal data retention regulations, especially in highly regulated industries.
This is why it's common practice for businesses to adopt a data retention policy template tailored to their particular sector.
The regulations concerning the retention of data may be broken down into four areas:
To ensure that your data retention policy considers all personal data stored by your business, one should conduct an in-depth audit of all collected data.
Depending on your data retention policy, you may need to keep certain types of information for longer than others. This includes data from databases, documents, emails, assets, imagery, production, system states, and video content.
The data subject's location should be taken into account next. Data stored in different locations may require separate data retention regulations in some situations. Part of this is that separate databases, servers, hardware, and other places may be subject to different enterprise and regulatory restrictions.