WORM (write once, read many) is a storage property that permits data to be written once while preventing alteration or deletion during a defined retention period. It protects records from tampering or accidental loss and supports regulatory, legal, and audit requirements. section 5.4.8
A WORM policy contributes to storage architecture in several ways:
- Preserves financial records, medical data, logs, and compliance documents as immutable records. section 5.4.8
- Implements immutability through specialized hardware or software-defined object-storage controls such as S3 Object Lock, Azure Immutable Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage retention policies. section 5.4.8
- Combines with object locking, versioning, lifecycle rules, audit logging, encryption, and access controls to strengthen integrity and compliance. section 5.5.2 section 5.5.3
Long-term government retention
A government agency retaining historical Iceberg records for more than a decade can use Amazon S3, Wasabi, or NetApp StorageGRID with object locking and WORM capabilities. These controls prevent deletion or overwriting for the required retention period; S3 can enforce bucket-level compliance-mode locks, while Wasabi makes immutability a default storage feature. section 5.5.3
