Apologies for missing last week. I’ve been a little busy preparing a little surprise:

You’ve probably seen the shorts by now. I hope you liked it.

If you’re wondering why I started shorts, it’s because people consume content differently. Shorts is a way to make it more accessible to everyone.

For now, let’s get back to regular programming.

Do your solutions include retention policies?

It’s a detail that’s often overlooked during implementation. Understandably, it’s not exciting. And, with minimal impact in the early stages, there’s no urgency to address it.

But, ignoring it can lead to a big mess down the line.

So today, I’ll be sharing my insights on what you’re able to avoid with retention policies.

Let me illustrate the situation with an example:

XYZ company relies on a document management solution as a critical part of its operations, essential for business functionality. In this case, it's specifically used to support customer-service transactions.

Without this system, XYZ company is unable to provide service to its customers.

The first concern is…

Halting Operations & Disgruntled Users

You might think: it would be easy to just order additional storage to prevent outages.

In theory, yes. But for XYZ company, two factors slowed down the process (likely similar across companies):

1. Unplanned and spontaneous orders raised alarms in finance, leading IT to delay requests until the last minute.

2. The procurement process typically takes over 7 days, requiring multiple justifications, approvals, and documentation steps.

As a result, operations were halted. End-users began feeling the pressure to perform, and without the system, they began complaining.

Data Cleaning and/or Migration

Without retention policies, there will be a need to migrate or delete data.

In the case of XYZ company, they realized the need to reduce files and had to quickly plan for migration. In this situation, rushing was unavoidable.

It was a nightmare.

There were many factors to consider, and everything had to go perfectly.

The files themselves are the easy part. The real challenge lies in ensuring the security of the new location and verifying that the right files are migrated with quality assurance.

Talk about migrating with thousands of gigabytes.

Note: Deleting them might be easier, but management often opts to store files as a precaution.

Out of Control Fees

Finally, this is fairly self-explanatory.

If you find out too late, you’ll likely be past the necessary retention period, resulting in paying more than needed.

If you're in the process of deletion or migration, you’ll continue adding storage until the migration is fully complete.

All of this could have been avoided.

Remember: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

That’s it for this week! See you next Tuesday!

Ciao!