About this interactive
The Data Management lesson asks you to think of data as having a life cycle, and splits it into three stages.
Create: data comes into being. It is entered, collected or compiled: a form filled in, a reading recorded, a scan made, a report compiled from sources.
Manage: the long middle of the data's life. It is used, shared, stored, transferred, moved, copied, backed up and versioned. Most security work happens here.
Retire: the end, and the stage the lesson says most often gets overlooked. Data that is no longer needed is archived (moved out of daily use into long-term storage, kept for a reason such as a retention rule or a legal hold) or destroyed.
The pair to watch is a backup and an archive. Both put a copy of data somewhere else. A backup protects data that is still in use, so you can recover it: that is managing it. An archive takes data out of use because its working life is over: that is retiring it.
Thinking about every stage is what makes a data management process comprehensive. Data that is created and managed but never retired piles up, and every old copy is still something to protect.
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