Data retention refers to the practice of storing data for a specified period to meet business, legal, and regulatory requirements. Effective data retention policies ensure that organizations retain data as long as necessary while minimizing risks associated with data breaches, compliance violations, and data loss. Key reasons why data retention is important include:
Compliance: Many industries are subject to regulations that mandate data retention periods, such as HIPAA in healthcare and GDPR in the European Union. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in severe penalties and legal consequences.
Litigation and Legal Discovery: Data retention policies play a crucial role in legal proceedings, where organizations may be required to produce relevant data as evidence or for discovery purposes.
Operational Efficiency: Archiving data allows organizations to access historical information for analysis, reporting, and decision-making, enhancing operational efficiency and informed decision-making.
To meet your needs, it's important to understand how data retention rules impact both Insights and Protect.
❗️ If you use both Insights and Protect, data retention rules will be applied the same across both applications.
Retention Rules
Each data type captured in Worklabs can be assigned a specific retention period. The retention period determines how long data remains in the Worklabs archive before it is permanently deleted. Currently, within the Worklabs admin console and depending on your plan, you may be able to modify the retention periods set for your account.
How retention impacts features
Insights
Insights's analytical capabilities are closely tied to its data retention period. For instance, if your data is retained for 75 days, your analysis and reporting will be limited to this time frame. This means you can only compare and review activities within the past 75 days. Data points or activities beyond this period will not be accessible for analysis.
Protect
In Protect, during the retention period, you can:
Search, view, and action content captured from your source system
Create and manage cases
Build alerts and actions based on the content
Execute discovery on Workplace security events captured by Protect
However, these capabilities are confined to the retention period. Once an activity or piece of data ages beyond this period, it is automatically removed from the Worklabs archive.
Setting Retention Rules
❗️Turning on a data retention rule immediately deletes data from the Worklabs archive. Please confirm your retention rules before applying them. Data will remain in the source system per your data purge rules.
From your Worklabs admin panel:
Open the menu below your name in the upper right-hand corner and select 'Settings'
In the Settings menu on the left-hand side, select 'Data retention'
For each data type, select the three-dot menu on the right-hand side and select 'Edit'
If no rule has been previously set, toggle the radio button to 'Override the default retention rule of Indefinitely'
Enter the number of days to keep data in the archive and click 'Save'
Best Practices
Understanding how data retention can affect your data analysis and compliance is essential. By aligning the retention periods with your operational and regulatory needs, you can ensure that Worklabs serves your organization effectively. If you need to adjust these settings for a more tailored experience or have questions, our team is here to help guide you.