Sensitivity Classification

Classification is the load-bearing decision in information governance and the one most often deferred. Every downstream control depends on it: exclusion from indexing, entitlement evaluation, retention treatment, disposition. Where classification is absent or inconsistent, those controls operate on guesswork. The reason it gets deferred is that it is genuinely difficult — requiring subject knowledge, policy judgement and a vocabulary the organization has often never formalized — and the reason it cannot be deferred in AI is that indexing makes the consequences immediate rather than latent.

Classification in Centralpoint runs during ingestion using the organization's own dictionary, so the decision is deterministic rather than probabilistic: no model is paid to judge sensitivity and no risk is inherited from a model judging it incorrectly. The classification then governs everything downstream, from whether a record is embedded at all to who may retrieve it.