In accordance with industry ‘best practices’ and to comply with numerous compliance regulations, Vuture has implemented various Information Security policies and procedures in order to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA) of their client data, their computing resources, and their business interests. This article describes the suggested data archiving and retention policies and procedures performed by the IT staff at Vuture.  It covers:

• Data Retention Periods plus some FAQs
• Log File & Temporary File Cleanup Tasks
• Bounceback messages and Reports

Data Retention

It is best practice (and included in GDPR and other Data Regulations) not to retain data for longer than required.  All Vuture data is archived and retained for a specified period of time, as determined by you. It is in the best interests of Vuture to align our data retention, backup, archiving and deletion periods with your policies, and we have made this possible through automated and manual procedures.

Currently most data is being retained indefinitely unless explicitly configured.  However this is not sustainable as it decreases the performance of your Vuture platform and goes against regulatory requirements and best practices. The following is a list of records that  Vuture can delete.  Please discuss with your Client Success Manager and decide on a data retention period that meets your firm or company policies.

Implementing a Data Retention Policy

Discuss with your CSM and agree the number of months for you wish to keep your data.  Three years or 36 months is recommended.

The CSM will enter the number of months at Admin.System.DataStorage.Contact Data Retention and then let our SysAdmins know they should set the automation running.

NOTE:  You will need to ensure that you have also removed from InterAction lists the contacts that get removed via the Data Retention Policy in Vuture.   This is to ensure they do not receive emails again.

The following records will all be anonymised or deleted on a monthly basis, at the single time interval you have agreed with your CSM. A backup of the anonymised data  will be kept for a one-month cooling off period, then removed.

Data Retention, Deletion and Anonymisation FAQs

Q. If we ask Vuture to apply anonymisation to the database, will that cover all of our contacts sitting on Vuture servers?

A. It will cover all your contacts older than the data retention period you pick. So, if you pick a 1 year retention period then it will apply to any contact actions older than 1 year. It will not affect contacts who were mailed, who clicked, filled in forms etc. within the last 1 year. That contact data will still be visible. If a contact was mailed more than a year ago and also within the last year you will still see the contact's details for the mailing that falls within the last 1 year.

Q. Will we lose the engagement status of anonymised contacts?

A. The anonymisation currently doesn’t apply to engagement status which does store email address.  Engagement uses both the email address and the CRM ID so we need to keep these to know who has not engaged.

Q. Once we have anonymised, does this mean that the most recent campaigns we will not be able to run the Dashboard reports effectively where the data names individuals e.g. Business Development Dashboard – Individual?

A. All reports will continue to work as normal - the only difference will be any anonymised contacts will display as ‘_DELETED’ in the anonymised fields.

Log File and Temporary File Cleanup Tasks

Log files and temporary files have a shorter retention and deletion period by default, due to the significant increase in number of files and storage space required to keep them. Each clean-up task handles the clean-up of one or more data set and each data set has a default retention setting that can be changed by your Client Success  Manager or by Vuture Support, usually through the Data Storage system settings.

This task clears up the following data with the specified default retention:

• Session Data - 30 days ("Admin.System.DataStorage.Session Data")
  Each time a user logs into the system, session data is stored about the user such as their access level on the container they are in and their user preferences. Historic session data is purged every 30 days by default.
• Email Raw Log Data - 90 days ("Admin.System.DataStorage.Email Raw Log")
  Raw log data for email sends is stored in your database for 90 days by default
• Queue Completed Data - 90 days ("Admin.System.DataStorage.Queue Complete")
  Data that is written back to your CRM goes through the Vuture queue. The API call for each successfully written back data item is stored for 90 days by default.
• Queue Error Data - 90 days  ("Admin.System.DataStorage.Queue Error")
  Data that is written back to your CRM through the Vuture queue but fails after retrying 5 times is stored separately to the successfully written data and is stored for 90 days by default.
• CRM integration logs - 90 days

Email Queue Cleanup Task

This task clears up the following data with the specified default retention:

• Email Queue CleanUp Days - 90 days ("Admin.System.DataStorage.Email Queue CleanUp Days")
  A copy of each bounced email is stored in file format for 90 days by default.

History Pages Cleanup Task

This task clears up the following data with the specified default retention (note this task is not enabled by default and must be manually enabled):

• Number of Pages Versions To Retain - 25 ("Admin.System.Page Options.Number of Page versions to Retain")
  This settings controls the maximum number of historic versions of a file to keep. It defaults to the last 25 versions.
• Number of Days To Retain History Pages - 90 ("Admin.System.Page Options.Number of Days to Retain History Pages")
  This setting controls the number of days to retain historic versions of a file and removes any older than 90 days by default.

Temporary File Cleanup Task

This task clears up the following data with the specified default retention:

• Temporary Files - 7 days
  Whenever you edit an email or page a temporary copy of the files is created. These temporary copies are purged every 7 days.

Vx Log Cleanup Task

This task clears up the following data with the specified default retention:

• Diagnostic Log Retention Days - 7 days ("Admin.System.Diagnostics.Log Retention Days")
  If diagnostics logging is enabled those files are kept for 7 days by default.
• Email Suppression Log Retention Days - 90 days ("Admin.System.Emails.Suppressed Email Logs Retention Days")
  If email suppression logging is enabled these logs are kept for 90 days by default.

Bounceback Messages

We will only retain full bounceback messages for 6 months.  There are three different reports for seeing bounceback messages:

Admin > Reports > Global Undeliverables will show the full bounceback message from 6 months ago to present.

Reports -> Email -> Email Global Undeliverables will show basic bounceback messages for as long as there are entries in the Email History table in the Vuture database.  This report also has a column for the full bounceback message which will show for the past 6 months.  If the email is older than 6 months the column will be blank.

Reports -> Email -> Global Bouncebacks report will show the basic message.  It will show the full bounceback message if it is in the past 6 months range; otherwise only the basic bounceback message will be shown.