Should You Delete or Archive Customer Data?

Your business needs data to survive. Digital collection, management, and clearing are essential functions you need to perform in order to keep a pulse on your customers and the way you’re interacting with them.

Businesses use data from many different sources to find patterns that allow them to make better, faster decisions for the organization. They’re also able to tailor their brand to their ideal customers’ wants and needs.

But consumers are wary of businesses collecting information about them, and they expect any data that’s collected to be carefully protected. Laws designed to prevent data theft and misuse are strictly enforced by governments across the globe.

So, how do you stay legally compliant, keep your customers satisfied, and still keep sufficient data on hand? What do you do with the mountains of data your business isn’t using, but still needs to keep?

You have two options: you can either store older data or delete it.

Both options have a place in data management, and each have pros and cons to consider. Let’s explore the difference between archiving data and deleting it.

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Key takeaways:

• Your business has mountains of data to process and store, and understanding how to organize it will inform your decisions on how to handle aging data.
• Though similar, archiving and deleting data perform very different functions for your company, and understanding the difference between archiving and deleting can save you trouble down the road.
• Data security is a major concern for your business. Data theft is a serious crime, and failing to prevent thieves from mining your databases will get you into legal trouble.

Differences Between Archiving and Deleting, Defined

The difference between archiving and deleting data is important to understand because you need to keep your datasets clean and accurate. Keeping too much data in databases is costly, confusing, grossly inefficient, and dangerous for your business and its customers.

Types of Data

First, let’s talk about the different types of data you may be storing. This is important because some types of data are useful to cyber criminals, and some are not.

• Personally Identifiable Information (PII): this is information that can directly identify an individual, including social security numbers, first and last names, phone numbers, and addresses.
• Non Personally Identifying Information (Non-PII): this type of data gives insight about your customers, but does not identify them as a person. Examples include behavior, location, IP addresses, demographic information, to name a few.
• Sensitive Data: this is highly exclusive and important information that requires extra security. Often only authorized individuals can access it.
• Intellectual property: this is information about something a person or organization has created and that they have rights to. This could be your own intellectual property, or your customers’. Examples include written property, trade secrets, patents, copyrights, trademarks, ect.
• Employee Data: you may have been collecting data on employee performance, satisfaction, engagement, absenteeism, or other information that allows you to gauge the success of your business’ day-to-day work environment and employee satisfaction.
• Raw Analytical Data: this is data that comes from the performance of your web marketing efforts. This could be social media engagement statistics, email marketing data, website engagement, etc.
• Sales Data: your business runs on sales and you need to keep track of progress and contacts.

Archiving Data

Archiving data means placing redundant, old, or trivial data into long-term digital storage where you can easily access it at any time. Types of data you want to archive include legal documents, non personally identifying information, and anything that may be part of a larger trend. For example, if you notice that customers are frequently calling about a certain error around a certain time of the month, that could be helpful information for future tech improvements.

If you decide to archive data instead of deleting it, there are several ways that you can store data so that it is accessible when needed but not taking up valuable space in your day-to-day files.

When you decide to archive data, it’s also important to consider how public or private that data is and who will have access to it. For example, you may want to have a separate archived data section for confidential information with more restricted access.

Deleting Data

Deleting data means wiping collected information from your company’s digital storage. This commonly includes personally identifying data, relatively quick customer service interactions such as password resets, and data from services your company no longer offers.

Businesses are often reluctant to delete data because it provides vital insights for success now, and into the future. This reasoning is understandable but can lead to some nasty surprises. Cybercriminals are relentless, and they routinely target data archives because they can reap vast amounts of information quickly. If that happens, you’re facing legal action, of course… but also a tarnished reputation, angry customers, and huge losses in revenue in the fallout.

People expect you to keep any information you get from them safe.

Keeping Your Customer Data Archives Secure

The decision to delete or archive data is completely up to you. As you evaluate what data you want to store, data security should be your very top priority.

Flimsy security can result in embarrassing and dangerous security breaches that leave your business and your customers’ information exposed to criminal activity. They also expose you to legal consequences because the world’s consumers and governments take cybertheft very seriously.

Laws designed to protect consumers’ data are very strict. If auditors find that you are non-compliant, they will impose heavy, ongoing fines and fees until your business complies.

Data protection laws that you need to be aware of and compliant with include:

General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) is a data protection law for European citizens. It’s a strict law that requires companies to give people control over their data that’s collected by businesses, and securely process and store that information.

California Consumer Privacy Act is a data protection law that pertains to American citizens. This law is designed to protect privacy by giving people more control over their data, allows data deletion requests, opting out of third-party data purchases, and other important protective measures.

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA)  is a U.S. federal law that protects medical patients by preventing exposure of their medical information. This law has a privacy component and a data security component so that personal information is safe in electronic transfers and storage.

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is concerned with protecting credit card data. It manages and strengthens security around account information, electronic card transactions.

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act is a U.S. federal law that provides financial regulations and auditing of public organizations. This law is focused on fraud prevention and error detection/correction at publicly traded organizations (though the guidelines apply to nonprofit organizations and private organizations, too.)

To prevent theft and noncompliance, you’ll want to invest in stringent cyber security for your data management.

Set Up Secure Data Archives With Intermedia

Data security is one of the most important parts of protecting your assets and your customers. To prevent data theft, you need a top-shelf security service that’s invested in protecting your data, so it stays right where you put it. Intermedia is your top-shelf security solution. Save yourself the hassle of major security breaches, and contact Intermedia right away.