On Privacy-aware Information Lifecycle Management in Enterprises: Setting the Context

This paper aims at setting the context for privacy-aware information lifecycle management within enterprises, i.e. the process of handling the lifecycle of personal and confidential information in a way that is compliant with privacy laws and people’s expectations (including data retention, deletion, notifications, data transformation, etc.). Despite the fact that enterprises are already using Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Identity Management (IDM) solutions to store and manage various types of data, in terms of “privacy-aware” lifecycle management of information much is still done by means of manual processes that are complex and hard to monitor. This is a green field, open to innovation. We argue that automation can be introduced to address this aspect by leveraging, among other things, existing enterprise ILM and IDM solutions. In this context, we investigate and analyse core privacy requirements and issues that need to be addressed by enterprises along with their implications and impact on existing ILM and IDM solutions. The goal is to create awareness and suggest potential ways to move towards their automation and simplification. We provide an overview of research and work done by HP Labs to develop approaches and technologies that can help enterprises to implement and automate aspects of privacy-aware information lifecycle management.