Organizations retain data for four primary reasons:
inertia—they’ve never worked their way through deciding what data they can or should delete, so they keep everything by default;
compliance—to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements for data retention;
knowledge—as a valuable store of institutional knowledge; and
spoliation—to avoid claims of lost or destroyed evidence during ediscovery and litigation.
Let’s take a moment to discuss that last point. Retention policies notwithstanding, data that is potentially relevant to a pending or anticipated litigation matter needs to be preserved when a preservation obligation is triggered. Failure to do so can leave the organization vulnerable to charges of spoliation. But trying to keep everything isn’t the best way to protect against these allegations. Instead, data retention policies should explain why an organization has decided to keep or purge various data. An organization that can explain its data retention policies and demonstrates how they apply them uniformly across each type of data is in a far better position to explain data purged before the preservation duty attached.And there are compelling reasons to purge data, namely: For more at Data Retention Policy
to reduce the costs of data storage;
to limit the damages associated with a potential data breach or cybersecurity incident;
to maintain speed and efficiency in computer systems, which can slow to a crawl when overburdened with unnecessary data;
to save employees the time and stress of searching through confusing and useless stores of extraneous data; and
to reduce costs and risks of ediscovery—because the more data you have, the more you’ll have to preserve, collect, process, review, and perhaps produce in ediscovery.
Of course, retention policies will vary for different types of data, based on the value of that data to the organization and the format, complexity, and location of the data, among other considerations. So, how should organizations design retention policies for Slack data? For more at Data Retention Policy
