This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Records Management
Organizations often end up creating, gathering, and accumulating a lot of data. The volumes of information stored by an organization can result in high costs because storing data is not free. While cloud vendors provide many ways of storing data, they will charge to store data, so organizations typically do not want to keep data for longer than necessary.
Records management is the process of determining how and for how long to store data. This large topic includes data classification and encryption, as well as versioning, retention policies, and destruction policies.
Versioning
Versioning is the process of keeping track of file content changes over time. Many cloud technologies provide versioning as a feature that can be enabled, so the versioning happens automatically whenever a data record is changed.
Retention
Retention refers to a policy that determines how long data should be stored. A retention schedule is created that will determine when data is destroyed and how older data is stored until it is to be destroyed.
Destruction
The destruction of data must be clearly defined when developing a records management plan. When the data is to be destroyed is one key element to define, but also how the data is to be destroyed should be clearly stated in the plan. Data can be destroyed by physical destruction of records, degaussing, or zeroizing.
Write Once Read Many
Write once read many, also referred to as WORM, is a form of write protection in which the data can be written only once and then it cannot be modified. This is a critical feature when you need to ensure that data has not been tampered with after it was created.