Harmonizing Privacy Regarding Data Retention and Purging
Nick Scope, Alexander Rasin, Ben Lenard, Karen Heart, James R. Wagner · 2022
Data privacy requirements are a complex and quickly evolving part of the data management domain. Especially in Healthcare (e.g., United States Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Veterans Affairs requirements), there has been a strong emphasis on data privacy and protection. Data storage is governed by multiple sources of policy requirements, including internal policies and legal requirements imposed by external governing organizations. Within a database, a single value can be subject to multiple requirements on how long it must be preserved and when it must be irrecoverably destroyed. This often results in a complex set of overlapping and potentially conflicting policies. Existing storage systems are lacking sufficient support functionality for these critical and evolving rules, making compliance an underdeveloped aspect of data management. As a result, many organizations must implement manual ad-hoc solutions to ensure compliance. As long as organizations depend on manual approaches, there is an increased risk of non-compliance and threat to customer data privacy.