NextGen > Digital Data Shredding
Why
Digital data shredding refers to the process of removing all data that is no longer needed. When retiring your legacy system, certain old data will become obsolete. Despite data storage expenses, various legal aspects often prevent you from keeping unnecessary data. If it’s required (e.g. business requirements) to keep historical data for analytics purposes, consider removing sensitive information (e.g. personal, medical, etc data) from the raw data. This process is well known as data anonymization.
Defining ownership of data is often tricky because there are legal considerations that need to be adhered to when storing users’ private data. Laws such as GDPR enforce strict guidelines on this aspect. Disobeying such legal requirements can lead to serious penalties. That is why it is inadvisable to hold on to any data that your system doesn’t need.
Another downside of holding unnecessary data is the increasing cost of storage. Especially if you’re using any cloud storage services, you can easily stack up expensive storage bills just to store data that does not have any business value and is no longer useful. For data analytics, consider just storing the outcomes (reports) of data analysis instead of the entire data load. This meta-information is significantly smaller in size and you can create it in a way that does not contain any user sensitive information.
How
Consider the following when you shred data from your legacy system:
Data returning options
Backup and return the user data to users before data is permanently removed from the system. You are legally obliged to do this, even before retiring the product. So be prepared and create necessary functionalities to do so.
Data availability timelines
Removal of obsolete data and the availability of data to customers are two often conflicting topics. There are legal considerations in both these subjects. Make sure you mention the period of availability of users’ data after the product retirement clearly in your user service level agreements (SLA).
Data shredding standards
There are several data destruction standards available (NIST 800-88, DoD 5220.22-M, etc.). Align your data shredding procedures to widely accepted standards to ensure that the data cannot be recovered in any way later.
Shredding evidence
Adopt a manual or an automated data shredding procedure. Either way, it’s recommended to keep some kind of evidence (e.g. logs) for audit purposes.