Content preservation and policy lock features to provide immutability for regulated compliance

Abstract

Customers in regulated industries face demanding compliance regulations, including content immutability. While broadened to allow software-based solutions, the regulations for immutability require content preservation to prevent overwriting, erasure or alteration of the content, where the preservation must be implemented through irrevocable features. Embodiments are directed to provision of an administrative user experience to enable customers to create a preservation policy that defines item(s) to be preserved. After detecting enablement of the policy, the item(s) may be preserved, a preservation lock on the policy may be initiated by disabling controls associated with the policy, and an attribute may be set to the policy to identify the policy as locked. Preservation of the item(s) may prevent content of the item(s) from being overwritten, erased, and/or altered, and the preservation lock on the policy may prevent alteration and/or revocation of the policy for a duration of the lock to satisfy the regulations.