High-level policy template (Security Architect perspective)
Purpose & scope
- Define business/technical data categories, retention baselines, regulatory requirements, and system coverage (apps, DBs, logs, backups, cloud storage).
Retention rules
- Map data classification → retention period → owner → justification (e.g., GDPR: personal = 1 year unless legal/regulatory need).
- Minimum/maximum retention and periodic review cadence.
Backups, snapshots, archival
- Backups inherit primary retention but are immutable for a shorter/controlled window; snapshots are short-lived for restore points.
- Archive to WORM/immutable storage when retention > production lifecycle; metadata must accompany archived objects.
- Maintain index/catalog for where canonical and backup copies reside.
Automated deletion workflows
- Orchestrate deletions via policy engine (tag-based), with staged phases: mark, quarantine, purge.
- Include pre-deletion checks (dependencies, retention expiry, legal hold flags) and safe-delete patterns (soft-delete then hard-delete).
Legal holds & exceptions
- Hold overrides automated deletion; record hold reason, scope, owner, expiration; suspend retention timers; require auditable approval.
Verifiable & auditable deletion
- Produce deletion receipts with object IDs, hashes, timestamp, actor, and proof-of-deletion (e.g., storage deletion log + zero-byte overwrite or crypto-hash of tombstone).
- Capture tamper-evident audit trail (WORM logs, SIEM ingestion, signed events).
- For distributed systems, use consensus or coordination service to record state transitions; run periodic reconciliation jobs comparing index vs storage and produce SLA metrics.
Controls & governance
- Role-based access, least privilege for deletion operations, approval workflows, periodic audits, and retention policy testing (restore + delete drills).
