The Most Secure Data is the Data You Don’t Have

In today’s threat landscape, one thing is clear: if you store data, you’re responsible for protecting it—and that’s a high-stakes, high-cost game. Whether it’s protected health information (PHI), financial records, or personal identifiers, the more sensitive data you store, the bigger the target on your back.

That’s why more security-forward organizations are embracing a radical shift in their thinking.

Welcome to the age of zero data retention. 

The Hidden Costs of Storing Data

Data already costs money to store depending on how much you have and how often you access it. But there are additional costs you may never have thought about before:

• Security. The real cost of data isn’t in collecting it. It’s in keeping it safe. Every byte of sensitive data you hold carries risk. That risk multiplies with every platform you touch, every workflow you automate, and every user you grant access to.
• Compliance. As a data owner and user, you must ensure information is collected, stored, processed, and shared in a secure and responsible manner. Failing to comply with legal, industry, and corporate regulations for sensitive information like personally identifiable information (PII) and financial data can result in significant penalties, legal action, and reputational damage. 
• Environment. Let’s not forget about the tremendous electrical strain data storage puts on the environment. Storing large amounts of data not only requires servers, but power conversion, network hardware, lighting, and cooling systems, the biggest electricity burden of all. Today, global data centers consume up to 4% of all electricity, which is projected to double by 2030. 
• Wasted data. “Wasted” data includes both ROT (redundant, obsolete, or trivial data like outdated or duplicate records) or dark data, which is data that’s collected, but rarely or never used. Though unused, the data still takes up space, unnecessarily costing money and energy to store.

Why Zero Data Retention Changes the Game

The best way to protect sensitive data is not to store it at all. Zero data retention offers a way to process sensitive data without ever storing it. Data flows securely from point A to point B (e.g. from a patient to an EHR or from a customer to a CRM) without lingering on the platform in between.

Here’s why it matters:

• No data at rest means less data to breach
  If your platform doesn’t store PHI, PII, or financial data, it’s not a target. Even if it’s breached, there’s nothing sensitive to steal.
  
  
• Easier compliance
  HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, and other regulations are built around minimizing unnecessary exposure. Zero data retention helps you meet these regulatory requirements out of the box, reduces the scope of audits, and simplifies compliance.
  
  
• Lower liability for your organization
  You can’t be held responsible for a data leak if your platform never retained the data in the first place.
  
  

“The best way to protect sensitive data is not to store it at all.”

How Intellistack Streamline Enables Zero Data Retention

At Formstack, we built Intellistack Streamline with zero data retention as a foundational principle—not just because it’s non-negotiable in heavily regulated industries like healthcare, financial services, and government, but because data storage and cost efficiency is important for everyone. Here’s how it works:

1. Data is securely passed through Streamline workflows—collected, routed, signed, or transformed—without ever being stored on our servers.
   
   
2. End-to-end encryption ensures that data is protected every step of the process.
   
   
3. Data lands securely where it needs to go (and nowhere else) thanks to our direct integrations with your EHR, CRM, or database of choice.

The result? The speed and flexibility of automation without the storage and compliance burden.

Less Is More Secure

In an era where data is both an asset and a liability, zero data retention isn’t just a best practice—it’s a competitive advantage. It lets your organization move fast, stay compliant, and operate with confidence in a high-risk digital world.

Want to see how zero data retention could work in your environment? Let’s chat about how Intellistack Streamline can help you automate high-stakes workflows without ever storing sensitive data. 

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