Industry-Standard Content Retention Policy Guidelines

Each industry has unique data retention needs driven by regulations and best practices. Below we provide guidance for key sectors – finance, health, high tech, manufacturing, and government – with suggested retention timeframes for different content categories and checklists of best practices.

These guidelines focus on user-generated content in Atlassian Confluence and Jira (unstructured data like pages, tickets, attachments, comments), but they generally apply to similar enterprise content repositories.

We emphasize compliance with EU and UK requirements (e.g. GDPR, UK Data Protection Act), U.S. regulations, and standards like ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2, and emerging AI governance standards (ISO/IEC 42001) where relevant. Each section highlights specific regulatory guidance (such as FCA for finance, HIPAA for health, ENISA for EU cybersecurity, etc.) and provides an outline of retention policy recommendations.

Disclaimer: these materials provide general, supplemental information and are not legal advice. Always consult your own legal, risk, and compliance advisors for guidance.