Why should your business adopt retention policies?

Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions are becoming prominent for every Business. Most organizations with aforethought about implementing a Backup and Disaster Strategy in their environment look for features like Recovery Objectives (RPO & RTO), SLAs and Backup techniques like Incremental Backups, Replication, and few others. Data Recovery remains as their first preference and they focus on features which can provide them faster restores with less downtime. Among other features, the retention policy turns to be an underrated feature, but has its place nonetheless. Here are the reasons why Retention Policies are important and how Vembu helps our customers to retain their data with its flexible retention policies.

Reasons for Retaining Data

Data retention is a process of storing or archiving the business data for a longer time. Organisations retain data for several reasons:

1. To comply the Local, State, Federal & International Laws, Regulations and Requirements
2. To access the Data at a later time whenever the organization needs for business reasons
3. To submit the data during Auditing

Retention Policies Importance

The most important reason for an organization to have an active retention policy is, at the time of audit they can manifest that all the important data are retained and can even be purged according to the policy and not be willfully destroyed. Retention Policies plays a major role in retaining the backed up data. The Business data must be retained for a period of time as per the regulations to avoid penalties or cases. After that certain period, the data can be purged. So to comply the legal regulations proper configuration of retention policy is necessary. To ensure the availability of critical data at the required time for easy accessibility, they must be retained and stored in a systematic manner by applying the retention configurations.

Laws on Data Retention in Different Countries

The data must be retained for a period of time as prescribed by industry standards and as long as the organization needs it. Once the data is no longer needed it can be purged. Depending on the nature of the organization and the type of data, different retention periods are laid down by the laws of different countries. These data retention rules and regulations are enforced by various laws in each country to ensure a uniform approach across all the organizations for retaining the data dealt with them.

Vembu’s Flexible Retention Policies for Businesses

Organisations are in a situation to comply the standards imposed by the country laws to protect the data. Vembu BDR suite is designed with features that help the organizations to meet the regulatory compliance. Retention Policy is one such feature which Vembu provides to meet the standards laid down for retaining the data for a certain period of time. The data retention period varies according to the organization’s type and their needs. Hence Vembu provides flexibility for the organizations to configure the retention policies as per their requirements. Even when complex retention rules are imposed by compliance standards, organizations can manage them easily with Vembu’s flexible retention policies.

Vembu’s Retention Mechanism

For Image-level Physical and Virtual machines backups, Vembu provides two types of Retention:

1. Basic Retention – In this retention type, user can have up to 99 daily merged recovery points
2. Advanced Retention – To have number of recovery points and to have different merge combinations of restore points like daily, weekly and monthly merge user can choose advanced retention

For Files/Folders and Application level backup, Vembu provides the following retention options:

1. Version-Based Retention – To have the multiple versions of the backed up files/folders, the user can choose any number of versions up to 99
2. Time-Based Retention – This option allows the user to retain the versions by specifying the period of time. Maximum 10 years of data versions can be retained with the following options
   1. Any number of versions can be created within retention period
   2. Restrict maximum number of versions that can be created within retention period

3. Deleted-files Retention (for windows only) – With this option user can either retain or purge the deleted files versions

Build a good Retention Plan with Vembu

A good retention policy is important to every business. Vembu’s Retention policy provides the following benefits:

1. The process of retaining the data according to the legal requirements is simplified and automated with Vembu (i.e,) data needed can be retained for shorter/longer period and data that would not be required in the long run can be purged as well
2. The data retained are stored securely and the storage space can even be reduced by limiting the restore points
3. The retained data can be accessed easily and quickly with Vembu’s recovery options

Thus with Vembu, the organizations can get highly industry required retention policies along with powerful backup and faster restore solution complying the regulatory standards.

Interested in trying Vembu BDR suite? Try Now on a 30-days free trial: https://www.bdrsuite.com/vembu-bdr-suite-download/

Got questions? Email us at: vembu-support@vembu.com for answers.

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