EncompaaS – Enterprise Compliance as-a-Service – promises a new solution to the governance dilemma: How do you transform into an agile digital organisation while maintaining control across all your content, applications and services, whether on-premises or increasingly in the cloud. EncompaaS CEO Jesse Todd explains how.

IDM: Jesse, what is EncompaaS and what prompted its initial development?

JT: We have been working with Content Manager for a long time through our consulting business Informotion, and we saw how our customers were faced with the dilemma of end users being tasked with deciding what content was critical from a compliance perspective. Then three or four years ago we began to see a shift in the market as organisations adopted a cloud focus and at the same time the growth of data exploded. We knew that end users performing the role of records keepers was only going to get harder – even impossible.

So we saw an opportunity to develop a SaaS governance platform delivered from Azure that integrated to Content Manager, and EncompaaS was born. The goal was to allow organisations to manage content in place within content repositories across their organisation and Cloud services using rules and policies managed by records managers. This removed the compliance burden from the end user and met our customers’ objectives.

We engaged with Micro Focus and Microsoft to really understand how their platforms and strategic go-forward were evolving so that EncompaaS could complement their offerings, as a dedicated software business operating as a sister company to Informotion.

IDM: Is Information Governance getting harder?

JT: Meeting Information Governance requirements is getting harder because there is more data and more business and operational complexity. Compounding this are more rigorous requirements from industry regulators, investigations such as Royal Commissions and arising from new compliance regulations such as GDPR. However, the growing maturity of AI and machine learning (ML) technology is providing an answer. Organisations can now benefit from an enormous amount of technology to help analyse, leverage and improve how they manage their information repositories, but it is only now starting to penetrate the marketplace.

IDM: Is automated governance achievable?

JT: I think we are getting much closer than ever due to the maturity of AI and ML services which allow us to discover, analyse and enrich content enabling us to gain a much richer understanding of the content and its value. This process means auto classification can become much more accurate, which permits us to apply rules and policies across information automatically. The pace at which AI and ML services are entering the market is astounding, and many have industry specific applications.

Just look at how rapidly Azure’s Cognitive Services stack is being improved. As these services evolve, content can be continuously enriched, allowing increasingly accurate decision making. The opportunity for organisations today is to take advantage of these services to automate the management of their information and more rapidly meet the growing complexity of compliance. Automated governance certainly feels within reach!

Organisations moving to a digital workplace are looking at how to take advantage of cloud services such as Salesforce, SharePoint Online & Teams. Yet, these services have limited compliance capabilities and need to be augmented to meet the depth of compliance rigour our customers require.

EncompaaS integrates into these services to improve their compliance capability so they can be confidently adopted – and it integrates into on premises repositories to analyse the content held in file shares and legacy applications. Then, EncompaaS can be used to manage content in place and archive it or migrate it, reducing organisational risk. EncompaaS natively integrates into Content Manager, building a bridge between CM and cloud services.

This allows organisations to move to the cloud and adopt new services at their own pace and extends their investment in Content Manager. EncompaaS provides a skilfully managed approach to digital transformation.

https://informotion.com.au/products/encompaas/