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Glossary · Compliance

Legal hold

All termsHow Enclessa secures data

A legal hold is an instruction that suspends the normal deletion of specified data because it may be relevant to litigation, an investigation or a regulatory request.

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Also called

Litigation hold

What Legal hold means

A hold exists to stop routine processes from destroying evidence. Once a dispute is reasonably anticipated, continuing to delete on schedule can itself become the problem, independently of whatever the underlying dispute is about — which is why the hold has to be capable of overriding retention rather than competing with it.

A workable hold has three properties. It is scoped, applying to named people, rooms or date ranges rather than to everything. It is auditable, so that who applied it, when and why is recorded. And it is releasable, because a hold that nobody can lift quietly becomes an indefinite retention policy that no data protection assessment ever approved.

Holds sit awkwardly with end-to-end encryption, and the honest answer is that they cannot reach it. Ciphertext can be preserved, but nothing readable can be produced from it by the operator. Any vendor claiming both full end-to-end encryption and full legal hold coverage over the same rooms is describing an architecture that does not exist.

How Enclessa uses it

Enclessa supports legal hold in the People module, where it exempts records from retention. A platform-wide hold marker at channel and user level is planned work in phase 6 and is not available today. In end-to-end encrypted rooms a hold can preserve ciphertext and nothing more, because Enclessa holds no key that opens it.

Related terms

Retention policyA retention policy is a rule stating how long a category of data is kept before it is deleted, applied automatically rather than left to somebody remembering.Read the entryCompliance exportA compliance export is a bulk extraction of message and file records in a structured format that a supervision, archiving or e-discovery system can ingest, rather than one a person is expected to read.Read the entryAudit logAn audit log is an append-only record of who did what, to which object, and when — kept separately from application logs so that it can be relied on as evidence rather than read as debugging output.Read the entryEnd-to-end encryptionEnd-to-end encryption is a design in which a message is encrypted on the sending device and decrypted only on the receiving devices, so that the server carrying it holds no key that can open it.Read the entry

Read further

The security page explains how Enclessa protects data and which certifications it does not hold. The trust centre covers the processing agreement, the subprocessors and the residency position. The FAQ answers the questions buyers ask most often.

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