How Can Automated Data Archiving Simplify Regulatory Compliance

The most precious asset that businesses own today is their data. And increasingly, companies are storing that data in the cloud. Spending on SaaS increased by 50% from 2018 to 2020, and 86% of organizations expect at least 80% of their software to be delivered via the cloud by 2022. But as the volume of data grows at an unprecedented rate, manually managing this information can quickly become overwhelming.

That’s why having an automated data archiving solution is so valuable for organizations that store data in SaaS providers like Salesforce. By archiving their old or obsolete data, companies can leverage the most up-to-date and relevant information in Salesforce, while avoiding excessive storage costs. It can also help declutter Salesforce environments and help reduce data volume, overcoming system performance issues.

Another less obvious, but equally important benefit of a data archiving solution is automated compliance through custom data retention policies. Own Archive is an example of a product that does just that.

Let’s take a look at the various regulations that dictate the retention of data and the Archive features that make it easy to stay in compliance with industry or government regulations and internal policies for data archiving.

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Which regulations have data retention requirements?

Organizations, and specifically CIOs, CISOs, and General Counsel, are being challenged to keep up with an ever-growing list of geographic and industry regulations. This often includes how they manage company data that is stored or archived and is no longer actively used, and rules for governing how long data must be retained.

At present, over 80 countries have relevant governance rules in place. While some industry regulations such as SEC 17a-4, HIPAA, and CFR Part 11 require that data be retained and accessible for extended periods, other regulations like GDPR, LGPD, and CCPA require companies to do just the opposite. CCPA and GDPR don’t place specific time limits on data retention, but do recommend minimizing the amount of data retained to what’s necessary.

In order to comply with the data retention component of these various regulations, Archive gives organizations the ability to set policies to automate the retention or removal of certain data. Without an automated solution, the process of ensuring compliance with your Salesforce data can be incredibly manual and tedious. We have created a compliance solution for businesses to help with their data management and data security. Let’s learn more about the specific compliance risks and how our automated solution can mitigate them.

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Two ways Own Archive simplifies regulatory compliance

With Own Archive, it’s easy to define, automate, and manage custom data retention policies that include specific data to be archived, how frequently data archiving activities occur, and how long archived data is retained. Our archive tool includes several features that make it even easier to automate Salesforce data compliance.

Right to Be Forgotten

The 'right to be forgotten' gives individuals the right to ask organizations to delete their personal data. This concept has been adopted across GDPR and CCPA, and is referenced in LGPD as the right to erasure.

Many companies receive a significant volume of ‘right to be forgotten’ requests from their customers and prefer to have complete control over responding to these requests. With the Right to be Forgotten software development kit (SDK), we provide the tools to delete records from Archive on demand.

Legal Hold

While customers may be required to remove certain archived data after a specific period, there may be other sets of archived data that customers want to remain intact for legal purposes (as evidence in a potential lawsuit, audit, or investigation), ignoring the retention policies that they’ve put into place. In several industries like Financial Services, Banking, Government, Legal, Healthcare, etc. that are highly regulated, it’s important to be able to quickly place legal holds on applicable data to avoid fines and potential loss of legal cases.

With Archive's Legal Hold feature, customers can search for a group of records to securely store and safeguard. No matter what retention policies may include the set of legally held records, Legal Hold ensures the archived records will be kept intact and never erased. This feature provides peace of mind if the records need to be handed over to the courts. Using this feature, customers can view a comprehensive list of all Legal Hold requests and export the data in the request to view what records they kept (CSV file).

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Want to Learn More About Data Archiving & Regulatory Compliance?

Our  data archiving library contains guides, white papers, blogs & more to help you understand data archiving and what is required for compliance. Are you in a regulated industry? We have helped organizations that must remain HIPAA-compliant and archive sensitive data.

• Webinar | Requirements For Protecting Your Healthcare Data In Salesforce
  • Learn strategies to limit risks and stay compliant while managing sensitive data.
• Ebook | Data Archiving: A Playbook For Success
  • Download our data archiving policy playbook to see how you can plan and execute a strategy that will fit your data management needs.