The Castlepoint story

In 2012, the Castlepoint founders established a consulting company, providing expert security, records management, and audit services to Australian Federal Government and large regulated industry.

Repeated government audits and inquiries had found that almost all regulated entities were consistently failing in their obligations to protect high risk and high value information. The Castlepoint founders recognised that these organisations did have a strong appetite for governance, risk, and compliance, but were limited by ineffective technology solutions. The available software for records, security, and discovery caused high impacts on users, systems, data, and governance teams, and created more problems that they were intended to solve.

Our founders recognised that we needed a new way to manage information. It had to manage all types of data, in all platforms, on premises as well as in the cloud. It had to manage the whole information lifecycle holistically because security, compliance, and discovery are interdependent.

It had to apply any kind of rule to data – secrecy provisions, information handling rules, privacy obligations, and records retention policies. And it had to do all of this without any of those detrimental impacts. It had to be invisible to normal users, and not require changes to the systems they use. It couldn’t move or modify any data, or create a high overhead for governance teams to manage it.

The Data Castle paradigm was created. The solution was designed by experts in the field to meet over 900 requirements from laws and Standards. It was built with new AI technology, and architected to be simple, scalable, and secure. It was the first true manage-in-place solution using AI, and was the start of a revolution in how information is managed. The Castlepoint product was rapidly adopted by Federal government departments within weeks of its release, and continues to be preferred by organisations of all kinds to help them know their own data, and manage their own risks.   

Castlepoint CEO Rachael Greaves, herself an auditor and records manager, puts down the speed of the company’s growth to the new paradigm they have developed, as well as the cutting-edge technology:

“It’s not well understood that information management can be a matter of literally life or death,” she said. “Failure to manage information properly has led to completely preventable catastrophes; not just breaches of information security like Office of Personal Management in the US, which has undermined national security for two generations, but also lapses in information retention, quality, and access. Vivian Solon, an extremely vulnerable Australian citizen, was deported because her records couldn’t be found. Paul Maguire was killed in the Grasstree mine because records weren’t maintained.”

“We are finally able to catch up with the exponential growth in data and get ahead of it again and doing that can save lives and livelihoods,” she said. “The traditional models for managing information do not work well anymore. And Australia is an excellent proving ground for RegTech and deep tech more broadly, as our government has a strong appetite for innovation and regulatory disruption.”