Autumn is surely here. Clocks have gone back, it’s dark on
leaving the office and the streets are covered in soggy leaves. A walk in the countryside
last Sunday was fun with the children shovelling through the heavy leafy carpets
with their feet making that once a year shug, shug sound.
I grew up in Trinidad, 10 degrees north of the Equator where the pronounced seasons are Rainy and Dry, spread near evenly across the year. The temperature range is small and so are the daylight differences. In the UK there are more seasons and the effects of their differences are numerous.
Cycles of life can be observed everywhere. With an average life span of 70 years, humans are perhaps tuned into those cycles that are crucial to having a good life but of course there are many others that are to the extremes of either side of that range. Mosquitoes might live just a couple days, the leaves on the trees are annual while our Sun has an expected 14 billion year lifespan. It’s only halfway through that so need for a 70 year lifer to worry.
Inanimate objects have a lifespan also. The ‘life’ might be debatable but the span is definitely limited. Everything we see around us was once something else and will be something different in the future. Things we create will span a fixed amount of time and then no longer be.
Data is like this. We create information to fulfil a purpose. When it is no longer useful it comes to the end of its lifecycle. The usefulness though is not limited to its intended purpose because information can be re-purposed. The biggest concern is that the new purpose will be criminal.
When a process is designed, the lifecycle of the information used must be included and preparations must be made for security at all stages. When that data is no longer needed it must be discarded after an agreed time and in a manner that gives assurance to all that there is no possibility that it can end up in the wrong hands and re-purposed to the disadvantage of the original data owners.
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