A data retention policy is all about best practice, keeping documents safe and for only as long as you need to, keeping costs under control and compliance.
HM Government Security Policy Framework: The Information Security Policy states "Information is a key asset to Government and its correct handling is vital to the delivery of public services and the integrity of HMG”
Every company should develop and implement a comprehensive and user friendly document retention policy that ensures compliance with legal, regulatory and good ethical business practices across all divisions and data assets regardless of format and location whilst maintaining controls on costs. Saracen can help you structure your policy for your records.
How can Saracen help with data retention policies?
We can help customers to clearly identify document types and make sure that we hold the correct retention period on file for each of those document types. Exactly when a file comes through the retention period will then be automated - as we will know the retention period for each file based on its type.
By having this process in place, archives will be destroyed in a timely fashion which will reduce the risk of paying for storage of expired material.
Retention policies and setting these up also assists all the different departments in the clients' organisation to review retention periods periodically. These can be globally edited on Saracen’s database with O’Neils Software.
Media/tape/data retention policy
As part of this healthy retention policy - specifically for you media tapes - Saracen can assist in identifying your media for review. Whether this is based on age of the tape or the amount of access counts - as stipulated by you - we can automate our system for spot checks and inform the you that the data tape needs to be checked.
We can at this point, if required, then assist in data refreshment by transferring data from older tapes to new ones to protect the integrity of data. Should any of the data be corrupt or unreadable due to drive failure at this stage, then Saracen will also be able to assist with data recovery. Please see our Tape Restore & Recovery section.
Please also see our page on How Long Do You Keep Records?