A European Preservation Order is a criminal-procedure order used to preserve electronic evidence held by a service provider so it can be produced later. It does not require immediate handover of the data; instead, it instructs the provider to retain specified material and prevent it from being deleted, altered, or overwritten while the legal process continues.
In cyber security, preservation matters because digital evidence is fragile. Logs, messages, account records, and metadata can disappear quickly through normal retention cycles or deliberate attacker cleanup. A preservation order helps protect the chain of custody by freezing the relevant data set at the provider and creating a traceable record of what was kept, when, and under whose authority. Defensively, providers need strong authentication, secure logging, and retention controls so the preserved evidence remains trustworthy and later admissible.