Guideline for Data Retention???

So what are the industry standards for the length of time that data/tape are stored off site?  Do you keep it a quarter, month, year.  It is obviously different based on your type of business but what might be the average you may ask…

Well…    

Data is archived for several different reasons. One reason is to comply with state and federal regulations. Another is to provide the ability to recover business critical data in the event of a site-wide data loss, such as a fire or flood. Another reason is to provide a secure repository for point-in-time, snapshot data, for baseline reference in programming, design, custom manufacturing, etc.

The minimum records retention requirements regulations vary by state and by data type, but typically they range from three years to permanent. Legally, most businesses need to keep records long term. Broadly speaking, state and federal regulation require:

Business records: 7 years to permanent

Contracts: 7 years to permanent

Employee records: 3 years

Payroll records: 3 to 7 years

Most high-end backup/recovery software will generate weekly, monthly, or quarterly archive tapes. Generally, a set of archive tapes is generated to coincide with month-end, quarter-end and year-end financial activities. For disaster recovery purposes, data retention is calculated as a trade-off between the costs of recovering lost data vs. the costs of maintaining the data. Like an auto insurance policy, the larger burden the company is willing to shoulder in rebuilding lost data, the lower the costs of insuring that all data isn’t lost.

 

Many large companies keep weekly archives off-site for a period of one month, and monthly archives for one year. Yearly archives are retained for the required state or federal term.

A typical full-service backup policy would be: daily incremental backups, retained in the tape library and cycled weekly. Weekly full backups are shipped off-site, typically on Monday and cycled every four weeks. Every fifth week, weekly archive set is retained for one year off-site — recycled or not, depending on the nature of the data. A full set of archives are generated at a specific time, usually coinciding with the fiscal year, to be retained for the mandated retention period.

In the event of a site-wide disaster, such as a fire, the maximum amount of data lost would be one week. For point-in-time snapshot data, baselines would need to be established based on the data in question, then full system archives generated. Retention times would depend on the data, and could vary from a few months to permanent.

Document Management: How to figure out how much storage you need

Article written by Stephen Lawson from www.cio.com

Saving all of that data can cost you.  Here is how to get a handle on how much storage you need and stay on top of legal document management and retention needs.

You probably know your company shouldn’t save every bit of data. Given regulatory requirements and the role that electronic records play in lawsuits, some enterprises save everything just to be safe. Yet, “more companies are sensitive to the fact that we can’t just keep throwing storage at the issue,” says IDC analyst Rick Villars.

Storage is cheap, but it adds up.  IDC a sister company to CIO.com found a 27% drop in the cost of disk storage between 2007 and 2008. Nevertheless, worldwide spending on storage reached $80 billion last year. Furthermore, if your company gets sued, or even called as a witness, experts say it can cost millions to identify needed documents—$250 to $600 per hour for the work and $150 to $1,900 per gigabyte for the software.

It’s better to figure out what you really need to save (there’s software to help) and buy only the storage you need, says Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau.

What You Keep and Why

Tucson Electric Power (TEP) has procedures to carry out data retention policies set by its legal department. This helps the utility company contain its need for storage—currently 200TB and increasing, says Chris Rima, supervisor of infrastructure systems.

For starters, TEP doesn’t mix backup with archiving. Analysts say this practice is critical because combining the two—saving temporary records along with files that must be kept for years—wastes capacity. TEP backs up 30 days of data for disaster recovery, while separately archiving e-mail and some other files for seven years.

Separated from backup and done with specialized tools, the archiving process runs more smoothly, Babineau says. Vendors offer applications that analyze data for backup and archiving based on corporate retention policies. TEP uses its own custom software.

Addressing e-discovery, the practice of collecting electronic evidence—is tougher. As soon as a company can reasonably anticipate it will be sued, it has to hold on to any records related to the allegations, says Wendy Curtis, special counsel for e-discovery at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. You have to be able to separate those from the rest of the data you routinely purge.

For about six months, TEP has used Symantec’s Discovery Accelerator software to analyze e-mail for e-discovery and is now expanding its use to all unstructured data in its network-based storage. TEP is also incorporating e-mail from user-created Exchange folders on PCs into corporate network storage, banning the use of Exchange folders to make e-mail retention consistent, Rima says.

Having good backup, retention and e-discovery strategies helps TEP know how much storage it needs. Once an enterprise has these rules and mechanisms worked out, it can begin investigating products, says Ovum analyst Tim Stammers.

Stammers suggests a strategy involving data deduplication, which takes common elements of documents that have many copies and saves them once to cut the amount of storage capacity you need. Storing data in the cloud, through services offered by such vendors as Amazon.com and Nirvanix, may also be more economical because you won’t need in-house staff to manage the systems.