Before 2015, East Gippsland Water faced a scenario familiar to many businesses and government bodies around the world—a growing volume of data, rising storage costs, and difficulty finding information quickly.

Locating information involved searching network and desktop drives. This included numerous hours spent sifting through documents created in previous decades by several other water corporations and shire councils, which later merged with East Gippsland Water.

Important records were stored in spreadsheets, databases, and other ways, but they could also be buried within email conversations or in audio recorded during presentations. These files used valuable storage space, even though it wasn’t necessary to keep them all.

East Gippsland Water turned to information governance integrator FYB, which recognized the need for a method of easily applying record-keeping policies across myriad data types. 

FYB recommended ControlPoint for this data discovery project. This solution is capable of analyzing more than 1000 different content formats, including shared network drives, SharePoint files, Microsoft Exchange repositories, images, audio, video, and social media.

As well showing what sensitive information East Gippsland Water was storing, ControlPoint streamlined the task of protecting it. The software understands context within documents, allowing it to automatically decide whether to keep or delete data. In this way, East Gippsland Water could identify important information in a fraction of the time it would have taken to manually search each network drive.

Another potentially time-consuming task was securing and keeping track of important information. ControlPoint simplified this job by automatically moving this data to the recordkeeping solution, Content Manager (formerly Records Manager).

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