Data lifecycle management is an essential practice for any successful business, however large or small. Too many small businesses let “small” documents slip between the cracks rather than properly filing them away, archiving them, or safely destroying them. These mistakes can lead to missing or deleted files and, in some cases, data that ends up in the wrong hands.
With the right data lifecycle management practices and planning mapped out, your business will know how to safely and efficiently manage its data from the point of creation to the point of its retirement or deletion. There are a few data lifecycle management best practices that are commonly followed by IT techs. Below, we’ll show you which best practices your organization should introduce and which practices you can implement immediately to get your data lifecycle management practices up to par.
The importance of data lifecycle management
While it is more relevant to some organizations than others, data lifecycle management is beneficial to any business storing and utilizing internal data as well as consumer data. Without proper data lifecycle management practices clearly defined, it’s inevitable that your business will misplace or be unable to locate an important file, that a mistaken file change will be irreparably made, that data will find its way into the wrong hands, and that your business will encounter downtime and financial repercussions as a result. In businesses tied to the medical field, data lifecycle management is especially important in correspondence with maintaining up to date HIPAA compliance. Improper destruction or storage of patient data can lead to fines, HIPAA noncompliance, patient data leaks, and other troubling situations.
However, with the right data lifecycle management practices laid out, your business can mitigate the risk of data loss, deletion and breaches, as well as the fines, penalties, downtime and reputation management struggles that go hand in hand with these occurrences. Here are a few data lifecycle management practices you should incorporate within your organization as soon as possible, if you haven’t already:
- Define your data types – Your organization likely handles many different types of documents and files — some more important than others. In order to outline an internal data management policy, you’ll need to distinguish the types of data you manage. Customer or patient data will need to be handled differently than accounting data. Each data type may have it’s own retention length minimums, archive policies, and safe destruction methods. Identifying the types of data you store and utilize is the starting point for outlining how to manage each kind.
- Create a file naming process – Losing data because it’s unsearchable is an easily preventable data lifecycle management failure. Your organization should abide by a simple, yet thorough file naming structure that will allow anyone within your organization to find the data they need in seconds.
- Implement a strong data backup plan – When a file is created, its vulnerability is immediate. Any file that lives on a physical storage device or computer is vulnerable to loss and deletion. While loss and deletion can occur due to physical damage, natural disaster, virus and many other threats, some of the most common data loss scenarios boil down to human error. It takes seconds to make an accidental, irreparable file change, or to accidentally delete an important document — and it can take days to get that data back, if it can be saved at all. As you define your data lifecycle management practices, you’ll want to invest in a reliable cloud backup solution and backup all of the data in your system. Other backup methods rely on the user to set and schedule backups, which can lead to skipped backup days. To fully protect your data from loss and deletion, it’s important to invest in an automatic, continuous cloud backup tool that will work quietly in the background, backing up the files your company works on as changes are made and files are created. With a solution like this, you organization will have the ability to retrieve any file at anytime, eliminating permanent data loss for good. Without it, data that gets lost or deleted by accident, error, or disaster will stay that way and will result in downtime, financial and even legal repercussions.
- Create a data archive policy that works for your business – Creating a detailed archive policy will help you and your employees decide how to manage data that is no longer in use but needs to be retained. Since your archive strategy will vary depending on the type of data involved, developing a complete archive policy will provide you and your employees with guidelines that will empower them to make decisions about which files to archive and which files to delete. Additionally, it should include instructions on where to archive data and how to archive data safely to avoid data breach.
- Archive seldom used data – As you distinguish between the types of data you own and set guidelines for each, you may notice that some of your data and files haven’t been updated or accessed for long periods of time. Depending on the type of data involved, you may be able to elect this infrequently used data to move into your storage archive. Moving seldom used data into an archive can clear up storage space on the devices you use daily and accelerate processing speeds to make your business run faster.
- Set data deletion guidelines – Just as you’ll need an archive policy to help your organization determine archiving best practices per data type, you’ll also need a data deletion policy to do the same. It’s important to outline data destruction guidelines for each type of data so that you’re properly deleting the data you no longer need, in compliance with industry regulations, and in a way that the data cannot find itself in the wrong hands once it leaves your system.
- Create a complete data management policy – Having clear cut guidelines is the only way to get your entire organization on board and participating in your new data lifecycle management structure. Once you’ve defined the processes for handling data storage, backup, management, archiving, and deletion, you’ll want to sum these up in a thorough data management policy. This policy should be shared with everyone in your organization so that they’re made aware of the new process and can begin putting it into place. You may want to assign an ambassador for your new data management policy that can keep your organization on track with compliance and guide your less tech-savvy users on how to implement these new practices so that they’ll stick.
By implementing these best practices, you can rest assured that your data will remain safe no matter which stage it’s at in its lifecycle. You can immediately check off a highly important step in building your internal data lifecycle management practices by instituting an automatic, continuous cloud backup solution.
