Laws such as the GDPR introduce a right for individuals to have personal data erased. The right to erasure is also known as 'the right to be forgotten'.

But what if you need to remove customer data?

Anonymization is the recommended approach for implementing the 'right to be forgotten' for an individual prospect or customer.

Anonymisation is better than the deletion of records in most cases. For example deleting a company may have big impact on integration with an accounting system, but you would also need to understand all of the parent/child hierarchy with not just core system entities but also custom entities.

Then there is the commercial and operational impacts. For example would it be right to delete opportunities or cases - how would this affect the performance stats for individuals and teams? Do you need to keep historical information to calculate likely future conversion rates and forecasting?

Note: In Sage CRM, a delete is a 'soft delete' (the record remains on the table), so personal data fields should be anonymized before deletion.

Customers may need to anonymise a large group of data (e.g. where there is no permission/consent to market to these contacts) after the GDPR comes into force

Mass anonymization of fields in a group of records is possible in Sage CRM via mass update functionality.

This will allow you to anonymize personal information.