How Castlepoint was used to achieve information compliance

Treasury is one of Australia’s oldest Federal Government Departments, with over 10,000 employees, and generations of data stored across multiple systems in their Protected network. With responsibility for national economic and fiscal policy, market regulation, and preparing the Federal Budget, it is imperative that the Department have robust and effective control of its information.  

Treasury had identified collections of legacy information held on network file shares and needed a way to identify the scope and volume of the content in order to report to their information governance committee to plan retention, disposal, and preservation activities as they transition to the cloud.

Treasury implemented Castlepoint to provide regulatory control over its unstructured data in file shares and SharePoint and it was installed on-premises in the secure Treasury network. They used Castlepoint to index all the content across tens of terrabytes of storage. Treasury also worked with Castlepoint to develop visualisations of information across all root directories.

Castlepoint has now registered, indexed, classified, and sentenced over 28M items in 300 systems. The application is relied on not only for records management, but also for strategic planning, data analysis, and business intelligence. All of these insights contributed to compilation of a report to the information governance committee, with a view to endorsing a transformation program.

Treasury had previously implemented EDRMS solutions with connection points to the SharePoint environment, but with enormous repositories of data, the integration architecture could no longer scale. After implementation of Castlepoint, Treasury were able to decommission the legacy system.

The implementation was completed in late 2019. By 2020, Castlepoint had become a vital system for the Executive, providing information value and risk reporting, compliance, and significant cost savings. Treasury plans to continue adding systems to Castlepoint, to cover the full enterprise.

The ability for Treasury to automatically apply their regulatory rules across all their legacy data helped them to significantly reduce the cost of their cloud uplift. By identifying records that had no continuing value, and did not need to be kept, they were able to descope them from the digital transformation, saving time and cost, and making sure their target cloud environment stayed clean and usable (not cluttered with low value, obsolete content).

Rather than a simple report on size, volume and location, Castlepoint also gave Treasury the dimension of retention recommendations. This meant that in addition to understanding the scale of the potential uplift, they were able to understand how much of the information identified was due for disposal and how often information was accessed or edited. This therefore allowed them to potentially eliminate content from the project.

Castlepoint has given Treasury’s information management team the ability to confidently provide metrics and insights to senior leadership, and to support strategies and plans for improving information management capability in line with the Australian National Archives’ new Building Trust policy.