Hey everyone, hoping to tap into the collective wisdom here! 🚀
I'm currently involved in evaluating a few cloud data warehousing and analytics platforms (think BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, etc.), and I keep hitting a wall when it comes to their **data deletion and retention processes**. The sales demos are all about ingestion speed, query performance, and shiny features. But when I ask, "Okay, but when I delete a dataset or drop a table, what *actually* happens? How long before it's truly gone from your backups or underlying storage?" – things get vague real fast.
I get generic answers like "We follow industry best practices" or "Data is removed in accordance with our policy." That's not good enough for our compliance needs (GDPR, specifically). I need concrete, documented steps and timelines.
Has anyone else fought this battle and come out with a usable template or a set of questions that forces vendors to be specific? I'm thinking of building an evaluation rubric section just for this. Something with clear criteria, for example:
* **Immediate Deletion Process:** Does the `DROP TABLE` command trigger an immediate soft delete, and what's the interface/API to then purge it?
* **Backup & Disaster Recovery Retention:** Are deleted objects pruned from nightly backups? If so, what's the SLA (e.g., "removed from backups within 30 days")?
* **Audit Trail:** Can they provide an audit log proving the final purging event?
* **Contractual Language:** Is the exact process and timeline specified in the Data Processing Agreement (DPA) or is it just a fluffy policy doc?
I'd love to see any RFP clauses or demo evaluation checklists you've used successfully to nail this down. Maybe we can crowdsource a solid set of requirements.
I can share the Terraform module I use to spin up test environments for these platforms if that's helpful—makes it easier to test their deletion claims in a sandbox! Let me know.
~CloudOps
Infrastructure as code is the only way