Platform 3 SolutionsPayroll data retention is not just a box to check for audits anymore. Though it may seem just a routine task, keeping good payroll records is a game changer of your company’s reputation.
It’s your safety net, and your bottom line! It’s about staying compliant!
Imagine this situation – John, an ex-employee, files a complaint against the organization for incorrect pay dating back seven years. The company had digitized everything a decade ago, shredding most paper records.
Maya, the HR & Payroll manager, and her team are still using age-old legacy system for payroll data management implemented in the early 2010s. It is notorious for its inefficient laggy performance and limited data retrieval capability. Even after spending hours scouring the system, the specific data John referenced is unable to be retrieved.
What are the consequences Maya’s organization may have to encounter? –the company may lose the lawsuit and settle unnecessarily; not only this, a single compliance breach may incur penalties in multiple jurisdictions.
Let’s have another situation – It is a regular Wednesday morning. Maya, the HR &Payroll manager, is attending the company’s annual audit meeting. Kim, the lead auditor, looks up and asks, “Could you please share the payroll data of the employees terminated in 2011?” Though it sounds like a quite familiar request during an audit, Maya feels her stomach sink and the room goes quiet.
Why does it become a haunting moment for Maya? – Searching for decade-old data in a clunky legacy system is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The thought itself makes her feel exhausted. The required data may not be accessible easily, not properly retained, or not aligned with current compliance standards.
The result could be – compliance violations, penalties for missing or inaccurate records, and a loss of trust in the HR department managing historical employee data.
In both scenarios, it’s not merely about data storage – but about retention policies and compliance risks.
As a decision-maker of an enterprise, you may often feel compelled to talk about the challenges you are facing with legacy systems in HR and payroll data management. That’s where Archon Data Store (ADS), the flagship product of Platform 3 Solutions, makes its entry. As a more desirable solution, it addresses the demands that are beyond the legacy system’s capacity.
Are you trying to solve the Data Growth and Retention Conflict
Every cycle of payroll has its own volume of data footprint—whether it is an employee record, pay slip, tax, bonus or any other related data. Thus, the data growth never stops. It multiplies over months and years across thousands of employees and pay periods.
Challenges of Data Growth:
- Legacy systems are not capable enough to handle exponential accumulation of payroll data and for long-term data retention
- Increased difficulty in data retention and retrieval
- Inefficient audit processes and reporting
- Security risk with potential errors and breaches
- Increased storage cost and system maintenance
ADS is the Solution for Data Growth Management
ADS stretches out a future-ready archive solution to manage massive data volumes. By archiving historical payroll records, ADS helps the live systems remain optimized and high-performing.
- Archiving & Integration–long-term, centralized, single archive solution for all legacy data
- Automated Data Retention–managing with enforced data storage and deletion policies based on predefined rules
- Centralized Data Access–search and retrieval features enabling to access archived data easily
- Centralized Compliance–long-term data retention aligns with regulatory compliances
- Security –Role-based access control reduces the risk of breaches and unauthorized access
- Reporting–comprehensive reporting to support audits
- Cost-effective Storage–lowering storage and maintenance cost
- Role-based Access Controls–only authorized personnel can access, view or retrieve the archived data
Do Data Retention & Compliance Complexities Impact Your Business
The international compliance regulators have significantly increased enforcement action against enterprises for compliance violations, over the past 5-10 years. Reuters reports that some of the major world banks have incurred penalty of over $2 billion. These global financial companies have been fined for the compliance failures related to unmonitored communications on personal messaging apps.
Payroll data archive shouldn’t be an afterthought entity but should be a forward-looking strategy. Across the globe, regulatory bodies have strictly imposed mandates setting down how long the employment and payroll records must be retained and in which format. Hence, the financial institutions and global enterprises must adhere to strict data retention compliance.
| Compliance | Purpose | Applies to | Data Retention Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| GDPR (European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation) | Protecting European citizens’ right to ask to delete their personal data | All organizations processing data of EU residents – ranging from multi-national organizations to micro-businesses | Can retain as long as the data is required. But, requires justification for retention – must delete when no longer the data is necessary |
| HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) | Privacy Rule standards addressing the usage and disclosure of individuals’ health information | Organizations that create, receive, maintain, or transmit Protected Health Information (PHI) – • Health plans • Health care clearinghouses • Healthcare providers who conduct transactions electronically |
6 years from the date of creation or the last effective date—whichever is later |
| SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) | Protect investors from fraudulent financial reporting – improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures | All public companies that are traded in the United States. The company auditors who are involved in financial records and audit reports | Mandates retention for at least 7 years |
| PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) | Technical and operational requirements to protect cardholder data | All entities that store, process or transmit cardholder data | Can keep cardholder data as long as it is necessary for business purposes. Enterprises must define and document retention schedules. Unnecessary data should be purged at least quarterly to prevent recovery |
However, legacy on-premises architecture was not designed for modern data lifecycle management, compliance automation, or cloud-driven integrations. Retaining all payroll data within enterprise legacy systems creates rigid data silos. It increases security risks and forces IT teams into resource-intensive manual processes for compliance. Similarly, former employees’ data from decommissioned HR systems needs to be archived and retained to meet industry-specific compliance requirements.
Such a spectrum of challenges associated with data storage, retention and compliance are efficiently managed by ADS Information Lifecycle Management (ADS ILM).
ADS ILM Facilitates Retention and Compliance Requirements
With Archon Data Store (ADS), IT leaders can apply automated retention policies, secure sensitive payroll data with AES-256 encryption, and ensure compliance without overburdening legacy HR management systems. ADS also enhances data accessibility by providing metadata-driven search capabilities—so payroll teams and HR teams can find archived records instantly during audits, legal holds, or HR inquiries.
Adding to it, Archon ETL helps archive legacy HR data from decommissioned HR systems to Archon Data Store; streamlining complex data workflows of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.
ADS ILM offers a comprehensive framework for data management throughout its lifecycle, namely – Ingestion, Storage, Retention and Disposition.
- Ingestion – Automated ingestion from legacy systems into ADS through Archon ETL connector.
- Storage–Flexible storage options to fit data archival needs of diverse enterprises:
- On-Prem or Cloud Storage – supports both storage types, aligning with respective infrastructure strategy, budget and regulatory compliance of organizations
- Storage Tiering – based on the age of data and access frequency, automatically or manually assigned to the storage tiers; aging policy to schedule storage migration
- Data Compression – an efficient and cost-effective solution to handle data storage
- Retention–Efficient storage capability of ADS to handle long-term payroll data retention. It applies retention policies automatically based on the regulatory requirements. ADS offers compliance-ready processes such as:
- Encryption and Masking
- Retention and Hold
It ensures access and secure data over time with improved compliance and data retention policy.
- Disposition – Upon the expiry of retention period, data is purged securely or placed on hold for legal/administrative requirements.
How ADS helps Cost Optimization
ADS incorporates effective data compression methods to reduce payroll data storage footprint and storage cost optimization.
- Parquet Format – columnar storage format for competent data storage and retrieval; better compression than row-based format; different encoding schemes per column; less disk space reduces storage costs
- Built-in Compression Codec Management–automatically handles the compression and decompression of data using chosen codec (compression algorithms); ability to use multiple codecs per column
- Up to 80% Compression on Source Data size – reduction in data storage requirements without compromising the quality of data
- Data migration between hot and cold storage for cost optimization
ADS enables enterprises to retain volumes of payroll data inexpensively with compression feature while ensuring accessibility and compliance.
Take Control of Your Retention and Compliance Strategy
Archiving historical payroll data and former employees’ data today helps businesses prepare for strategic HR & Payroll data retention in full compliance with required regulations, reduce costs, and improved system performance —whether that’s staying on-premises, migrating to a cloud platform, or transitioning to a hybrid environment.
With Archon Data Store (ADS), you get a compliant payroll data archiving solution that keeps historical payroll data secure and accessible.
Your Payroll Data Retention has to be proactive, but not reactive. Stay in Control and Compliance!!!
Talk to Platform 3 Solutions and see how Archon Data Store (ADS) can bring structure and security to your payroll data archives.
