Information security and compliance: The role of retention policy management across your organization

With Retention Policy Manager, documents, emails, electronic files and other forms of information are captured easily, stored securely and accessible instantly whenever you need them.

It provides an intuitive way to track, audit and discover content — from creation through final disposition — enabling you to manage the complete lifecycle of all information automatically.

With a single view into the organization’s records, users can prove compliance with internal and external regulations and policies without impacting day-to-day productivity.

Compliance challenges facing businesses today

Regulation compliance

Industry and government regulations require organizations to manage and retain certain records. Many organizations find this challenging to do because they lack automation on their information when it comes to retention and destruction.

Proving compliance

To prove compliance during an audit or in a court of law, organizations must have visibility into the actions that occur on specific records. Many organizations don’t know what information they have, where it is stored, how many copies are floating around and if the record itself is authentic and trustworthy.

Electronic discovery

Searching, retrieving and reviewing information for litigation is time-consuming and expensive. Organizations need a tool to not only search for information, but to ensure that it can be put on hold and protected from modification or deletion if the retention period has expired and exported in native or PDF format.

Automating compliance and destruction

Regulatory compliance is the key to avoiding penalties and auditing nightmares, but it is nearly impossible to expect end users to know and follow the complex requirements around records management, especially in the digital world. Typical records management automation needs to include management of dispositions and holds, comprehensive but flexible control, and seamless integration with existing business processes. 

Benefits of a solid retention management policy

Automatic compliance with organizational/legal requirements

Policies are automatically assigned at the document type level, as documents are brought into the system and indexed, ensuring compliance without disrupting daily business processes.

Lowered risk and reduced costs

Automated destruction of information can reduce the expense of litigation review while making retained documents easily accessible for a compliance audit. It also saves on data backup, accessibility and migration — decreasing maintenance costs and reducing the amount of information being managed.

Proof of compliance

Prove regulatory compliance quickly, while gaining internal policy consistency.

Respond to litigation/audits quickly

When asked to provide information related to regulatory compliance or pending litigation, users can easily search and place information on hold, producing this information for external review without creating a security risk.

Faster access to information

Ensure quick access to pertinent information about past activities and improve decisions for current and future activities through rapid access to information that is reliable, accurate and trustworthy.

Greater security

Protect private information and comply with data privacy laws.

The advantages of Perceptive Content for compliance

Hyland’s Perceptive Content solution helps organizations stay ahead of the mounting pressure of evolving data security regulations.

Perceptive Content provides reliable workflow capabilities and extensive integrations that help organizations overcome unstructured content and ad-hoc processes – from capture to disposition.

Perceptive Content is:

Easy to integrate with business applications

While many content services solutions require significant time and effort to integrate with existing business systems, Perceptive Content makes it easy.

The patented learn mode technology allows users to capture data from any business application using an easy point-and-click approach.

Manages all information regardless of format

Although legally defined records must be retained securely for a required amount of time, Retention Policy Manager also gives you the ability to manage and remove transitory information.

This reduces the amount of information being searched, accessed and managed — greatly lowering the risk and potential cost of litigation.

> Read more | Why fast-paced enterprises need secure file sharing

Automatic retention policy assignment

Retention Policy Manager automatically places each document under the correct policy based on its index values, allowing end users to continue with their everyday business processes without additional work.

Key features of Perceptive Content

Create and capture

• Automatic indexing
• Generate searchable metadata at capture for quick access later

Access and usage

• Restrict access to authorized users
• Search for records regardless of format
• Organize information to support organizational functions and role-based access

Manage and retain

• Manage records throughout the lifecycle
• Automatically trigger retention policies via predefined values
• Keep information for as long as legally or operationally needed
• Retain records no longer than necessary

Litigation and audit holds

• Easily search and apply holds to prevent modification or deletion even if the retention period has expired
• Export information on hold in pdf, tiff or native format for external review or discovery

Disposition

• Automatically occurs at the end of document lifecycle
• Option to require approval on destruction
• Retain destruction report as a record
• Accession support (e.g. Nara for historical information)

What using Perceptive Content looks like

1. As part of their normal routine, ABC, Inc. human resources captures employment applications in Perceptive Content. Automatic indexing places these documents under the appropriate retention policy, based on the document type. The records manager of ABC, Inc. sets up a retention policy that automatically preserves employment applications for two years, then destroys them.
2. An applicant who does not get hired at ABC, Inc. feels the decision was a result of discrimination, and the HR department has been notified that a lawsuit is possible. In response to this information, the records manager places all of the applicant’s information in Perceptive Content on hold, preserving relevant information until notification that the hold can be lifted is received. Such information is on hold indefinitely and cannot be modified or deleted until the hold is removed.
3. Employment applications are scheduled for automatic destruction after a two-year retention period.
4. The retention policy covering destruction of these applications requires the approval of both the HR manager as the level 1 approver, and the records manager as the level 2 approver. After an email notification is sent to level 1, they approve destruction, prompting level 2 to receive a notification, as well. Only after the last level has given approval does the system destroy the information.
5. All other employment applications are destroyed, but the one of the applicant whose information was put on hold is protected until the hold is lifted.

Make more informed business decisions with Perceptive Content and Business Insight

Business Insight is an optional upgrade to your Perceptive Content system and allows every user in your enterprise to run and view reports – to expedite audits and drive efficiency throughout workflows.

When also using Business Insight, records managers can execute multiple reports, including a document disposition report and a document destruction report.

A document disposition report shows the retention policies for each document type and the action to be taken upon disposition. This report is executed before the disposition of documents.

A document destruction report shows which retention policy was executed; the specific documents that were destroyed; and who the approvers were, along with information on when it was approved for destruction and when it was destroyed.