AWS Backup now offers you the ability to create legal holds on your protected data beyond your defined retention policies, for legal and auditing purposes. Legal holds prevent your backups from being deleted after the expiration of their retention period, until your backups are explicitly released from legal hold. With this feature, AWS Backup allows you to manage legal hold requests at scale and help prove compliance to outside counsel, auditors, and related third-parties. Together with AWS Backup Vault Lock , this new capability helps you meet the key criteria for data storage and preservation of electronically stored information (ESI) set forth by SEC Rule 17a-4(f), FINRA Rule 4511, and CFTC Regulation 1.31.