An excellent article in the September 2012 issue of Corporate Counsel Magazine focuses on the tradeoffs between data management (storage, security, speed, and storage space), information management (storage, organization, and rapid access to information ), and data retention (creating a defensible policy to avoid litigation and regulatory sanctions if certain information is destroyed). According to the author, just because a business can keep data in perpetuity, often in cloud-based applications, does not mean that it should do so. The negative aspects of unlimited data retention include the difficulty of archiving and segregating information for easy access. The gist of the article is that it makes sense to have a retention policy that discards information when it’s no longer required for compliance purposes, backup, or analysis. Click here to read the article.