retention limit
What It Means
Retention limit is the maximum amount of data your organization keeps in storage and for how long you keep it. It's essentially your company's policy on when to delete old information, whether that's based on storage space running out or time periods expiring.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
CAIOs must balance the need for AI training data against storage costs and legal compliance requirements like GDPR's data minimization principles. Poor retention policies can lead to expensive storage bills, regulatory fines, or losing valuable historical data needed for AI model development and performance monitoring.
Real-World Example
A healthcare AI company might set a retention limit of keeping patient interaction logs for 7 years to comply with medical record laws, but only store raw voice recordings for 90 days due to privacy concerns. After 90 days, they automatically delete the audio but keep the processed text data for training their diagnostic AI models.
Common Confusion
People often confuse retention limits with backup policies - retention is about how long you keep data for business use, while backups are copies for disaster recovery that may have different timeframes.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare, retention limits are governed by HIPAA, FDA regulations, and state laws that mandate specific timeframes ...
Finance: In finance, retention limits are critical for compliance with regulations like SOX (7 years for audit documents), SEC re...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"refers to the amount of information that is stored long-term, and can be measured in volume (the size of the total collected logs in bytes) and time (the number of months or years that logs are stored for)."Source: Industrial_Network_Security_2011
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