Storing Archival Data - Part Deux: Page 3 of 5

Some industries, most significantly SEC regulated
broker-dealers and pharmaceutical companies (notice both traditionally
organizations with money to spend), are required to keep their data in forms
that can't be deleted or modified by anyone -- even administrators being
threatened by senior executives. Therefore, storage systems should have two levels of retention
enforcement. The first allows an administrator, hopefully after jumping through
more hoops than just logging on as admin, clearing the RO flag and deleting the
file, to remove the backup of Julie's iPod the data mover shifted to the
archives. The second, for those highly
regulated industries and lawsuit magnets like tobacco companies, shouldn't allow
deletion or modification of any kind.
The flip side of data retention is data destruction. At the
end of the specified retention period, a fixed content storage system should
actually destroy the data by discarding encryption keys or overwriting data
blocks, index entries and other metadata -- not just marking the object deleted
and the space as re-usable. Of course,
this should be an option as some organizations would rather have an un-delete
function.