Today, many organizations must retain specific data for a specific time period. Failure to follow these regulations could result in organizations having to pay very heavy fines. Around the world various regulatory requirements, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, DOD5015.2-STD in the US and the European Data Privacy Directive in the European Union, are changing how organizations manage their data. These regulations specify what data must be retained, whether it can be changed, and for how long it must be retained, which could be for a period of 30 years or longer.
These regulations frequently demand that electronic data is secure from unauthorized access and changes, and that there is an audit trail of all changes to data and by whom. Oracle Database can retain huge quantities of data without impacting application performance. It also contains the features required to restrict access and prevent unauthorized changes to data, and can be further enhanced with Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall. Oracle Database also provides cryptographic functions that can demonstrate that a highly privileged user has not intentionally modified data. Using Flashback Data Technology, you can store all the versions of a row during its lifetime in a tamper proof historical archive.