keepretain
Keepretain is a concept in information governance and data lifecycle management that describes policy-driven strategies for retaining and protecting data across storage tiers to meet regulatory, legal, and business requirements.
The concept emphasizes explicit retention policies that specify minimum and maximum retention periods, conditions for extending
- Policy engine for defining retention rules and holds.
- Data catalog and classification to tag data by sensitivity and regulatory domain.
- Storage backends with immutability options, including WORM-like mechanisms and archival tiers.
- Workflow and event processing to trigger retention actions or suspensions.
- Audit, logging, and reporting to document compliance and enable eDiscovery.
Implementation considerations:
- Data classification accuracy and coverage across data sources.
- Compliance with cross-border data transfer and regional regulations.
- Integration with backup, archiving, and disaster recovery processes.
- Versioning and data integrity checks.
- Applications include regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and government, where retention mandates and legal holds
- Limitations include management overhead, potential storage costs, and the need to enforce policies consistently across heterogeneous
As a concept, keepretain guides how organizations design data retention programs, rather than prescribing a single