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Storage

Legislative Requirements

One of the drivers for an IT department to review its archiving strategy is the various legal, regulatory and compliance requirements affecting digitally stored data.

There are two distinct aspects to archiving in a regulatory environment:

• The first is all about policies for retaining data and equally important - deleting data.
• The second is matching the technology available to meet the specific requirement.

Where policies are concerned, the decision how long to retain data in an archive depends upon:

• The applicable regulatory requirements which set a minimum level and
• The organisation’s internal policies which may extend this period

However, some legal requirements also mean that data must be deleted when it is no longer required for the purpose for which it was gathered (Data Protection Act 1998), so equally important is a data deletion policy that ensure only data which is legally acceptable is kept in an archive.

Additionally, there are issues around whether archived data should be capable of being changed and, if so, tracking who has done this.