Retention policy
Definition
An organisation's rule specifying how long log data is stored before deletion or archiving. Policies are typically driven by compliance requirements and storage cost. Short retention windows create gaps in the forensic record when incidents are discovered late.
Related terms
- Alert triage
- The process of reviewing SIEM-generated alerts to determine which are genuine security events and which are false positives. In forensic investigations, alert...
- Chain of custody
- The documented chronological record of who collected, handled, transferred, and examined a piece of evidence. For digital evidence, chain of custody includes...
- Log correlation
- The process of matching related events from different log sources using shared attributes such as IP address, username, timestamp, or session ID....
- Normalisation
- The process of converting log data from different vendors and formats into a common schema so that fields can be compared across...
- SIEM
- Security Information and Event Management. A platform that ingests log streams from multiple sources, normalises them to a common schema, and applies...
Explained in
- Log Correlation and SIEM in Forensic InvestigationsAn organisation's rule specifying how long log data is stored before deletion or archiving. Policies are typically driven by compliance requirements and storag...