At some point, you may be required to produce electronically stored content regardless of where it resides (network drive, database, file server, etc.). You may have to prove that all of the content was produced or destroyed in accordance with an established records retentions policy.
A good retention management system that includes document retention policies is essential in ensuring legal compliance stipulated by various organizations, state Departments of Insurance for example. The system supports your ability to prove that destruction of requested documents was in accordance with a document retention policy.
Using the ImageRight retention management functionality, you can define retention rules and schedules in ImageRight Enterprise Management Console (EMC) to apply policies across all content stored in the ImageRight system. The uniform application of policies ensures information that is no longer useful or required is systematically destroyed. The rules and schedules include the details of how long the information should be retained and the retention or destruction trigger dates that control the operation of destroying (purging) information in the system. In other words, you have the flexibility to dictate what types of content can be purged or retained in the system.
There are two options for handling content for which the retention period has elapsed. The content can be:
- Retained for a manual approval process, which is invoked with the Document Retention Approval command in Desktop, before being purged.
- Purged automatically with no manual input or review needed. The application of this procedure is configured in EMC.
There are other essential features of the ImageRight retention functionality that you can use in Desktop. Using the:
- Freeze command, you can prevent changes to or deletion of information to make sure people do not change or delete information subject to legal discovery.
- Hold command, you can quickly respond to an ad hoc request for preservation of documents by suspending the document retention policy for the duration of the hold period (seeHold for Retention Management).
- Set Cut-Off Date command, you can trigger the calculation of the retention date.
- Set Retention Date command, you can set the date until which content must be retained in the system.
In separate topics, we explain how to use the manual approval process and how to apply a freeze or hold on content. Before reviewing the topics, you will find the definitions below helpful.
- Retention period is the amount of time the content must be preserved in the system, based on your organization's retention policy.
- Cut-off date is the date that triggers the calculation of the retention date.
- Retention date is the date until which content must be retained in the system. After this date, the content becomes eligible to be permanently purged from the system.
A very simple example of a retention policy might be that claims related documents must be retained for seven years. The cutoff date might be based on the date a claim is closed. If a claim closes on March 8, 2010, and the retention period is seven years, the retention date will be reached March 8, 2017, and the related content is subject to being purged from the system.
When the retention date is reached, content approved for purging will not be purged if there are multiple pointers or database references to the content. This situation might exist if the content exists in two different files. When the retention date is reached, the content will be removed when all database references can be removed. In other words, content will not be permanently purged until the last reference to the content has been purged.
Content that has been copied to write-once media (DVD, CD-ROM, or optical platter) is encrypted. The encryption keys are stored in the database. The purge process permanently deletes the keys after the retention period. Once the encryption keys are purged, the content on media cannot be decrypted.
It is important to mention, that to complete the purge process after the retention date has been reached and the content has been approved for purging policies, you must start the ImageRight Retention Engine in EMC. The Retention Engine is local to each site, that is, your master and any satellite sites that you may have. Therefore, the Retention Engine should be run for each site. For more information regarding the Retention Engine, see the EMC documentation.
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