CISSP Asset Security Practice Question
An organization's data retention policy specifies that customer records must be retained for five years after the end of the business relationship. After that period, what should be done with the data according to best practices?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Securely destroy the data
Once the retention period expires, data should be securely destroyed to prevent unauthorized access and comply with privacy regulations.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Continue retaining the data indefinitely for future use
Why it's wrong here
Retaining data indefinitely, especially personal or sensitive information, directly contradicts sound data governance principles and the organization's specified retention policy. This practice significantly escalates the risk profile by increasing the attack surface for potential data breaches, incurring higher storage costs, and creating substantial legal and regulatory non-compliance liabilities under frameworks like GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA, which mandate data minimization and purpose limitation.
- ✓
Securely destroy the data
Why this is correct
Securely destroying the data is the correct action when its defined retention period has expired, as mandated by the organization's policy. This process involves irreversible sanitization methods, such as degaussing, cryptographic erasure, or physical destruction, to ensure the data cannot be reconstructed or accessed. This minimizes the organization's attack surface, reduces legal and regulatory compliance risks, and upholds data minimization principles by eliminating unnecessary data holdings.
- ✗
Archive the data to offline storage
Why it's wrong here
Archiving data to offline storage is typically performed for information that still requires retention for a specified period (e.g., legal holds, historical records, regulatory compliance) but is no longer actively used. However, if the data retention policy explicitly states that the data's retention period has *ended*, archiving it merely prolongs its lifecycle and associated risks, such as potential unauthorized access or breach, rather than fulfilling the policy's requirement for disposition.
- ✗
Anonymize the data and keep it
Why it's wrong here
Anonymizing data involves removing or obscuring direct identifiers to prevent re-identification, making it suitable for analytical purposes where individual privacy must be protected while retaining utility. However, if the data retention policy dictates *destruction* after a specific period, anonymization is not an equivalent disposition method. It still implies continued *retention* of the modified dataset, which deviates from the policy's requirement to eliminate the data entirely, and carries residual risks of re-identification.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Asset Security: Privacy and Data Retention
Key term
Policy
A policy is a set of rules or guidelines that defines how an organization manages, secures, and operates its IT systems and services.
Key term
Privacy
Privacy in IT is the control over how personal data is collected, stored, used, and shared by systems and organizations.
About these practice questions
One of 747 original CISSP practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CISSP practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CISSP exam.