Keep what you must, dispose of the rest
Data lifecycle and records management
Retention and records in Microsoft Purview — designed around actual legal and operational need, not a default label dump.
Keep what you must, dispose of the rest
Retention and records in Microsoft Purview — designed around actual legal and operational need, not a default label dump.
Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management and Records Management sit together: retention labels and policies decide how long content stays; records declaration, restrictions and disposition review decide when something is a record and who may dispose of it. Switching on a default Microsoft 365 retention policy is not an implementation.
Ghani Governance designs that model for UK organisations — including the tension between UK GDPR storage limitation and sector or contractual retention — then configures Purview around it. Product behaviour is defined in Microsoft’s data lifecycle and records management documentation; our job is the design, test and handover layer those pages do not provide.
What you must keep, for how long, and where it actually lives — not a copied schedule nobody owns.
Data lifecycle labels and publishing scoped to locations and populations that match the obligation.
When an item becomes a record, what that restricts, and who is allowed to declare or lock it.
A path for items that must be reviewed before deletion, with named reviewers rather than an unattended job.
Storage limitation versus legal or regulatory retention, written so a DPO can follow the reasoning. Not a legal opinion on your facts.
All Purview services · UK and Greater Manchester service area
Existing labels, holds, and the retention rules people already follow by habit.
A short label set tied to obligations, plus when something is a record.
Lifecycle and records settings in Purview for a pilot scope.
Reviewers see real items before automatic deletion is trusted.
Owners, change control, and how a new obligation becomes a label change.
No. Backup is a restore capability. Data lifecycle and records management decide how long information should remain available for business, legal or regulatory reasons, and when it should be disposed of. They solve different problems.
Not as two thin pages. Retention labels and policies (data lifecycle) and records declaration, restrictions and disposition review (records management) are designed together so a record is not just a renamed retention label.
Not if it is designed against actual obligations. We start from what you must keep and what you may dispose of, then configure labels and disposition review. Automatic deletion without a reviewed model is how programmes lose trust.
A scoping conversation about what you need to protect, what is already configured, and what must not break.