Overview

The high-profile data breaches of Optus, Medibank, and Latitude have highlighted the risks of over-retention of personal data. While the strategic imperative is on leveraging data through technology, including AI, it requires accurate and reliable data. However, most organisations are collecting and generating exponentially increasing volumes of data each year and are struggling to safely and efficiently dispose of data that is no longer needed for regulatory retention requirements or for legitimate purposes.

With increasing regulatory focus on the protection of personal information, organisations should be reviewing their overall information lifecycle (ILM) management and specifically how they manage data collection, classification, retention and disposal to be compliant with applicable records, privacy and cybersecurity regulations and reduce risk.  ILM is the system by which an organisation controls the collection and generation of data, storage, use and, importantly, disposal of data and information.  It is important to remember it also includes management of physical records, paper documents and artifacts, which continue to be generated and stored in archives either onsite or in external storage facilities.

The benefits include improved regulatory compliance and improved data quality for decision-making throughout the organisation, including risk and audit committees and the Board.