The amount of information held by businesses has been growing exponentially for many years. Each new technological revolution promises us the ability to store more data, access it more easily, and manage it more flexibly, and all at ever-diminishing cost. All this creates new opportunities, but also new headaches. This is especially true since the advent of regulations such as GDPR, under which companies can face heavy fines for privacy breaches.

Businesses now tend to have multiple silos of data, often unconnected from each other, stored using a wide variety of technologies. Although paper is becoming a thing of the past, many companies still hold scanned archives of their old paper records. Mature businesses today may hold data using dozens or even hundreds of formats and device types. This was the enormous, and growing, problem that RecordPoint’s founders, Anthony Woodward and Elon Aizenstros, set out to solve, when they founded their business in 2008, in Australia.

Brent Gatewood is a RecordPoint Product Evangelist and data regulation expert based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He points out the rising regulatory costs and pitfalls associated with holding data:

“Our founders identified a need to manage records in-place. If you go back before 2008, records management began in the traditional way. There was a plethora of laws about retaining information. Then you had the rise of privacy – in the UK that means GDPR especially – and now as well as minimum retention times, there were maximums. At the same time, data growth was going crazy, so it became beneficial to the business to dispose of old records.”

Reducing the amount of information that a business holds is not only necessary for regulation, but it reduces cost and risk. Potential legal processes, for example, become less costly if there is less information to declare during a discovery process. Businesses operating in regulated industries can also avoid significant fines if they handle data according to relevant compliance legislation.

Meanwhile, security and privacy breaches are becoming more common around the globe. Businesses now need to seriously prepare for the event of a breach: it’s no longer a matter of “if” but “when”. Understanding where your data is, and its sensitivity, is key in making sure it is protected.

The cloud was still in its infancy when RecordPoint was born. “We’d started with paper records being digitized. Then we had the rise of SharePoint on-premises, followed by SharePoint Online. So, we launched Records365, our cloud solution.”

But just as data was proliferating, so were the forms that the data took:

“It wasn’t just SharePoint, of course. There was data in OneDrive, Exchange, Teams, SAP, Salesforce, Workday… Records365 is based on our connector network, and we connect to anything. There are literally thousands of systems we can connect to. And because everything is bespoke – nobody has a vanilla SAP installation – we create Recipes for each customer so the Connector is tailored to their environment.”

Does this also help companies to manage the costs of their legacy systems? “Sure – what we’re doing is taking Records365 and managing content. So, say you have an old JDE mainframe [younger viewers should imagine a ton of metal pumping out large amounts of heat and noise], but it can’t be turned off. We allow management of data within that system. You find right away that you can lose 40% of that data because it’s Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT). And then we can manage the rest of the data until it’s sunsetted.”

Going forward, the RecordPoint platform allows old and new data to be married together. “We can reach in and pull content out to be used elsewhere. For example there’s old contract data that might be tied to data in a newer system. We can reach in and access that information. But we’re not trying to be a new repository, simply allowing people to access data wherever it lies.”

This saves on the need to migrate old data, and to retrain users. “We don’t disrupt the old systems – that’s burdensome for the end user. We attach compliance and regulatory information, but the user of the old data doesn’t need to know.” The Records365 platform consists of a sophisticated set of tools: “Classification Intelligence is an AI tool to that classifies data automatically. File analysis allows us to identify ROT [redundant, obsolete, trivial] content. And then there’s metadata enrichment – taking metadata from system A and applying it to information in system B.”

Brent points out that RecordPoint offers more value than just the abilities to manage information and ensure compliance. “What we’re giving our customers is management of data through its entire lifecycle. Now we’re more than just managing the retention of it: we’re enhancing the value. Getting rid of the clutter increases the value of that information asset.”

These days, RecordPoint is a global business. In the UK, the company partners with Bramble Hub to deliver projects to the public sector. For more information, see their partner page.