Streamline retention with flexible schedules

In the past two years, organizations have invested in and spent most of their time on digital transformation efforts while accepting greater risk. These risks are fueled by using multiple tools that promise easy collaboration with anyone, from anywhere. Thus, business content has become increasingly spread out across different systems, making it harder than ever to govern. According to Gartner, through 2025, 80% of organizations seeking to scale digital business will fail because they do not take a modern approach to data and analytics governance.

Businesses cannot afford to wait when it comes to information governance. With the high costs of regulatory exposure, the challenges of manual retention and the growth of unstructured content, the time to act with implementing a robust governance program is now. By centralizing your content in a single system in the cloud, you can remove the traditional barriers to effective governance and protect your business for the future.

What is Box Governance?

Box Governance is the content lifecycle management your organization needs to reduce risk and stay compliant, while keeping teams productive. Box Governance offers retention, legal hold, and disposition solutions built for an increasingly complex regulatory environment — so you can manage the lifecycle of your content all while staying compliant.

• Set retention policies with a disposition action at a global, folder, or file (via metadata) level across your content.
• Preserve content for litigation by placing users or folders on legal hold that can be for a set period of time, or continuous until the legal matter ends.
• Allow admins and/or co-admins to permanently delete trash, or delegate permanent trash deletion to specific people.
• Automatically apply retention policies based on business event trigger dates to connect retention policies to departmental business processes.
• Modify an existing retention policy by adding new folders to onboard business units in phases.
• Maintain an unlimited number of versions for all files, enabling the ability to preserve and restore all previous versions.

Box ensures proper retention and disposition of your business content with retention policies. With global-, folder- or file-level (metadata-based) retention policies on your content, Box easily meets your compliance needs. You can select a pre-defined retention period or a custom time-frame, choose what happens to the content at disposition and who gets notified. The proper policy is enforced without burdening the end user, and it all happens all in the same place they work, reducing risk and content sprawl.

Introducing modifiable retention

Compliance remains a key driver for organizations to realize or expand their data governance strategy. In a regulatory landscape that's constantly shifting, we want to give you peace of mind that your retention policies can evolve flexibly with your business.

From the start, we built Box Governance for highly regulated industries and our existing retention policy type was intentionally designed to be non-modifiable. As Box has grown, we have seen the need to expand our retention policies, and Box Governance now has two types of retention policies: modifiable and non-modifiable.

Modifiable retention policies will provide flexibility as external regulatory environments or internal governance policies change, allowing customers to implement retention policies with the ability to modify them later. This allows for both the creation and modification of retention policies, including shortening them, as well as making policy changes retroactively to content already under retention.

For our customers who need to comply with SEC Rule 17a-4(f), there’s no need to worry. Going forward, when a policy is created your Box Admin can specify if it is modifiable or non-modifiable. Non-modifiable policies can continue to be used to help you meet SEC/FINRA retention requirements.

Rethink your governance strategy with Box

It’s no small task to appropriately manage, govern, retain, and dispose of all content. When you have unstructured content spread across different systems, it can simply be too difficult to keep track of where content lives and whether you’re properly governing it -- There’s no time like the present to start tackling information governance built right into the Box Content Cloud.

Learn more about Box Governance or join us at Box Works to see modifiable retention in action!