Dark Data

Dark data is the content that never enters a search index, a retention schedule or a governance review: attachments buried in mailboxes, files on personal drives, decisions recorded only in chat, recordings nobody transcribed. Estimates vary but consistently place it at well over half of enterprise storage. Its danger is asymmetric — it carries full discovery and breach liability while contributing nothing, because liability attaches to possession while value requires retrievability. Illuminating it is not primarily a technical exercise: the content must be located, characterized, classified and either governed or defensibly destroyed, and the last decision is one only the business can make.

Centralpoint's ingestion is designed to reach these sources rather than only the tidy ones. Data Transfer connects the systems where content actually accumulates, Data Cleaner evaluates what arrives against the organization's own dictionary, and taxonomy assignment places it in a structure the business recognizes. Material that should not be retrievable is excluded during that pass rather than discovered later.