Keep what you must. Delete what you should.
Retention schedules mapped to your actual obligations, cold data tiered off expensive storage, and end-of-life deletion that happens rather than being intended.
Keeping everything is not a retention policy
Deleting data feels risky, so most organisations keep everything indefinitely. That is expensive, and it is also a liability — data you no longer need is still data you can be compelled to produce, and still data an attacker can take.
- Primary storage is full of data nobody has opened in years.
- Retention obligations exist in policy and are enforced by nothing.
- Legal hold is applied by emailing people and asking them not to delete things.
- Responding to a discovery or subject-access request takes weeks of manual searching.
What we build
A retention schedule derived from your real obligations, implemented as automation — with cold data moved to storage priced for it, and deletion that is defensible because it followed a documented rule.
- A retention schedule mapped to statutory, regulatory and contractual obligations
- Classification that determines which schedule applies to which data
- Tiering of cold data to storage priced for infrequent access
- Automated deletion at end of life, with the decision recorded
- Legal hold that overrides deletion and is applied by system rather than by email
- Search across the archive for discovery and subject-access requests
How it runs
Obligations first. Without them, every deletion decision becomes a negotiation.
- 01Establish the obligations
What you are required to keep, for how long, by which statute, regulator or contract — documented rather than assumed.
- 02Classify against the schedule
Data categorised so the correct retention rule can be applied automatically rather than case by case.
- 03Tier the cold data
Infrequently accessed data moved to storage priced accordingly, transparently to the applications that hold it.
- 04Automate end of life
Deletion executed on schedule, with the rule and the decision recorded so it is defensible later.
- 05Enable hold and search
Legal hold suspends deletion by system, and the archive is searchable when somebody asks for records.
What changes once it is running
What an enforced retention schedule changes.
Storage cost falls
Cold data moves off the expensive tier it was sitting on for no operational reason.
Obligations are actually met
Retention is enforced by the system rather than dependent on nobody deleting the wrong thing.
Deletion becomes defensible
Data removed under a documented rule is far easier to explain than data removed ad hoc.
Discovery stops being a project
A searchable archive turns a multi-week exercise into a query.
How an engagement is shaped
Legal and compliance set the schedule; we implement it. That division matters.
Obligation mapping
Two to three weeks with your legal and compliance stakeholders producing a retention schedule. We facilitate and document; the obligations are theirs to confirm.
Classify and tier
Classification applied and cold data moved, which typically pays for a meaningful share of the engagement.
Automate and operate
Deletion, hold and search implemented, then ongoing operation as the schedule evolves.
Common questions
The things buyers ask before they commit. If yours is not here, it is a good first question for the assessment.
- What if we are not sure what we are obliged to keep?
- That is the common starting position and the mapping phase exists to resolve it. Where genuine ambiguity remains, the safe default is to retain and revisit — but the ambiguity should be documented rather than allowed to justify keeping everything forever.
- Does archiving break the applications that hold the data?
- It should not. Tiering is designed to be transparent to the application, with retrieval latency the only difference. Where an application cannot tolerate that, it is excluded rather than forced.
- Can we delete data that is under legal hold?
- No, and the system enforces that. Hold overrides the retention schedule until it is released, which is precisely why hold needs to be a system control rather than an instruction to staff.
How much of your storage has not been opened in three years?
In most estates it is a large share, and it is costing you on the fastest tier you own.