For most organizations, the volume and complexity of their data is increasing daily—email, documents, instant messages, and more. Effectively managing or governing this information is important because you need to: For more at Data Retention Policy
Comply proactively with industry regulations and internal policies that require you to retain content for a minimum period of time—for example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act might require you to retain certain types of content for seven years.Reduce your risk in the event of litigation or a security breach by permanently deleting old content that you're no longer required to keep.Help your organization to share knowledge effectively and be more agile by ensuring that your users work only with content that's current and relevant to them.These retention settings work with content in place that saves you the additional overheads of creating and configuring additional storage when you need to retain content for compliance reasons. In addition, you don't need to implement customized processes to copy and synchronize this data.
Use the following sections to learn more about how retention policies and retention labels work, when to use them, and how they supplement each other.To assign your retention settings to content, use retention policies and retention labels with label policies. You can use just one of these methods, or combine them.
Use a retention policy to assign the same retention settings for content at a site or mailbox level, and use a retention label to assign retention settings at an item level (folder, document, email). For more at Data Retention Policy
For example, if all documents in a SharePoint site should be retained for 5 years, it's more efficient to do this with a retention policy than apply the same retention label to all documents in that site. However, if some documents in that site should be retained for 5 years and others retained for 10 years, a retention policy wouldn't be able to do this. When you need to specify retention settings at the item level, use retention labels.
