Goal

Goal of this article is to explain how you can adjust your data retention settings in the Customer Data Platform.

Product

• Mobile Marketing Cloud

  • Customer Data Platform

Steps

• Go to your customer data platform in your Mobile Marketing Cloud account

• Open the settings page (using the left menu bar navigation)

• On the "general" tab of that page you can find the Data Retention Period settings on top of the page.

• By default this setting is set to 2 years.

  • You can adjust this to either:

    • indefinitely (not recommended)

    • 5 years

    • 2 years

    • 1,5 years

    • 1 year

    • 9 months

    • 6 months

    • 3 months

    • 2 weeks

Background

Data is one of the most valuable resources today and as a result, data has become a priceless commodity across all industries, and not to forget, a target for hackers.

Businesses gather high volumes of data on a daily basis and given the number of laws and regulations that exist to protect that data, it’s essential that your organization develops and enforces a strong data retention policy. 

How can our CDP help?

Setup your Data Retention Period in your CDP settings and make sure you comply with your industry guidelines. We advise to set the period to 2 years, but depending on your use case this can be shorter or longer. 

What Is a Data Retention Period?
A data retention period refers to the amount of time that an organization holds onto information.
Different data should have different retention periods. Best practice dictates that data should only be kept only as long as it’s useful.
That said, certain laws and regulations have specific requirements regarding data retention periods,
so it’s important to do your research before determining the retention period for a data retention policy.

If a profile hasn't been updated for the specified retention period with an event (of any kind) it will be deleted, as well as any underlying events.

When activating a (new) retention period on an already existing account, all data outside of the configured retention policy is deleted permanently after enabling a retention policy.