Data Lifecycle Phases

What Are Data Lifecycle Phases in Ethyca?

To understand Data Lifecycle Phase, it’s useful to take a step back and think of the way data flows through your business. There’s a moment when a piece of data first enters your business ecosystem, moments when it is transformed or processed in some way, and other moments where it’s simply at rest.

Each of these phases in the data journey carry a different set of considerations for privacy management, impact, and risk for your business. In Ethyca, a Data Lifecycle Phase (DLP) is a value or set of values assigned to a particular data use case in the Ethyca application. The phases associated with a use case influence how Ethyca displays the use case on your data map. 

You’ll see the four lifecycle phases displayed across the top of your data map in Ethyca’s control panel. Now we’ll explore them in more detail.

Why Are the Lifecycle Phases I Select Important?

In Ethyca, lifecycle phases don’t strongly influence how we manage data for a given use case. For instance, a data subject request from one of your users will be surface data in a use case no matter the lifecycle phases it touches.

But lifecycle phases do matter for your business, and so it’s useful to have them visualized as part of your data map. As an example, any use cases associated with Retention should be paired by a Data Retention and Destruction policy. Beyond simple compliance, Ethyca’s lifecycle phases helps key business stakeholders understand the data that needs special process attention.