Partner Spotlight: how Castlepoint is helping organisations govern without disruption

We’re fortunate to work with some truly extraordinary people and partners, one of them is Castlepoint.

If you’re subscribed to the Fri-Up, our very cool and interesting newsletter, you may have already seen this. But for those who missed it, we’re excited to share our recent Q&A with Castlepoint CEO (and fellow Aussie abroad) Rachael Greaves.

As the volume of information grows, so does the risk that comes with it. Castlepoint offers a powerful, low-impact solution: it governs data where it lives using explainable AI, no duplication, no disruption.

In this Q&A, we explore what makes Castlepoint different, and why its command-and-control model is gaining traction across both Australia and the UK.

Can you explain Castlepoint in a sentence?

Castlepoint is command and control AI that gives you the high ground over your risk. It reads, registers, and classifies all the information in a network, in every format and system, to make sure you can find and minimise any data risk, anywhere, anytime – automatically, explainably, accurately, and impact-free.

Castlepoint is known for its ability to govern data without moving it. Why is that important and how does it actually work?

Most medium or large (and even some small) organisations have millions and millions of documents, emails, database entries, chats… It’s too much information for anyone to stay on top of, and it's changing every second. All that content can have risk, and value, and can be subject to different rules. Castlepoint used AI to classify it automatically, based on what it is about (not just where it is). AI is really the only way to do this at the scale we are dealing with. But we can’t move all of that information into an AI system, or copy it up into a data lake, or tightly integrate with the many systems it is stored in to try to manage it. We have to manage it in-place, where it lives, because those other approaches introduce far too high a risk, cost, and impact and are much too disruptive.   

With compliance requirements growing fast, how do you stop governance and security from becoming a blocker instead of an enabler?

The real blocker is and has always been the threat actors. They can be malign of benign – people making genuine mistakes is the biggest cause if data spills and breaches. Regulation is written in blood: we have it because, if we don’t control our risk, someone gets hurt. Compliance is literally an attempt to ensure the ‘best practices’ are in place to protect everyone. Destroying records precipitously, sharing things that should be confidential, and losing things that are essential all harm businesses and their stakeholders and retard progress of any kind. So compliance has always been intended to take away those drags and free us up to move forward and be agile. Unfortunately, compliance technology has traditionally caused a really outsized impact on business operations. That’s why we innovated something that provides full command and control, with no impacts – and even provides enablement for the business to do even more with their data.  

How do companies/organisations in the UK and Australia differ in their approaches to data governance?

The UK is a little behind Australia and NZ on forward thinking compliance and regtech adoption. Many of the world’s first and still leading privacy, cyber, critical industry, and ethical AI regulations and standards came from Australia. The UK is absolutely catching up though, with several major AI-enabled compliance programs currently being introduced across government, with the private sector also picking up the trend. Pressures come top down (from regulation), bottom up (from stakeholder expectations), laterally (from competing companies already adopting AI) and even from internally, with CDOs wanting to reuse and exploit corporate data using AI, while CISOs and CROs say No. We have to make data safe, clean, curated, and compliant, so that we can respond to all those pressures.  

Castlepoint is a highly sophisticated solution - what are your top tips when it comes to explaining complex technology to people?

Storytelling is key – it’s not real until it’s put into context. We have case studies of responding to hacks, identifying flags of child abuse, managing Indigenous data sovereignty, supporting forensic investigations for controversial court cases, and dozens more. When you know what every document, email, and database entry in the network is about, there’s not much you can’t achieve. And those examples are what makes it tangible and truly understandable.  

In a world where information risk is growing faster than human capacity to manage it, Castlepoint offers a way forward, one that’s automated, accurate, and almost invisible in its impact.