Versioning and object lock

As an enterprise-grade cloud service provider, we offer sophisticated versioning and object lock features in our Impossible Cloud Storage product. These features are designed to provide our users with advanced data protection and management capabilities. Our product is built following the industry standard, Amazon S3, so users can expect the underlying features to be similar to what they're accustomed to from other cloud providers.

• Versioning: Our versioning feature allows you to save, retrieve, and restore any version of an object saved in a bucket. Versioning provides an extra layer of security by offering a way to restore deleted or overwritten items. This makes it simple to recover from user or application errors. Versioning is also helpful for data archiving and preservation.

• Object lock: Our object lock feature is a data protection function that allows users to select particular objects to be immutable. This means that the objects cannot be altered or deleted by any user. Users can also set a period for an object to remain immutable, after which it can be modified or deleted. It's important to note that object lock requires versioning

Object lock differs from versioning in that object lock prevents users from permanently deleting each version of the object - while versioning simply allows users to create and delete versions of an object. Thus, with object lock you can store objects using a write-once-read-many (WORM) model.

There are three different types of retention modes:

• Compliance: A protected object version can neither be overwritten nor deleted by any user. Additionally, its retention mode cannot be changed, and its retention period cannot be shortened. This enables the highest data protection functionality.

• Governance: A protected object can neither be overwritten nor deleted. Additionally, its lock settings cannot be altered unless the user has been assigned the necessary permissions. Therefore, you can still grant some users permission to modify the retention settings or delete the object if required. You can also use governance mode to test retention-period settings before creating a compliance mode retention period.

• Legal hold: This operation prevents an object version from being overwritten or deleted even if the retention period expires. Only designated users can overrule this hold.

Object lock can, for instance, help you meet regulatory requirements that require WORM storage or protect you from ransomware cases - as objects remain unchanged on our platform. For details, see our use cases.