Enterprise Information Governance Platform

An information governance platform is enterprise software that discovers, indexes, classifies, and manages unstructured data across file shares, email, collaboration tools, and cloud storage. It enforces retention schedules, supports defensible deletion, preserves data for litigation, and provides the audit trail required to prove compliance with regulations like GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, HIPAA, SOX, and SEC 17a-4. Rational Governance is Rational Enterprise’s information governance platform.

Rational Governance is an information governance and records management platform built for legal, compliance, privacy, IT, and security teams at enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions. It gives a single interface for file analysis, retention, compliance, eDiscovery response, privacy, and data security across unstructured data — in place, without forced migration.

Rational Governance crawls and indexes unstructured data in place across Windows file shares, NAS, Microsoft 365 (Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams), network storage, and major cloud repositories. It builds a unified content index with full-text and metadata search, letting you see every document, email, and attachment across silos from one interface instead of managing each repository separately.

ROT stands for redundant, obsolete, and trivial data — duplicate files, outdated content past its retention period, and low-value material like personal files and cached copies. ROT typically accounts for 30–60% of enterprise storage. Rational Governance identifies ROT using content analysis, metadata, age, and duplication signals, then executes defensible deletion workflows so you can safely reclaim storage without compliance risk.

Dark data is information organizations collect and store but never analyze or use — orphaned file shares, legacy backups, departed-employee mailboxes, and unindexed cloud content. It inflates storage costs and creates hidden exposure for breaches, privacy violations, and litigation. Rational Governance illuminates dark data by indexing and classifying it, giving compliance and security teams visibility into what exists and where sensitive content lives.

Defensible deletion is the documented, policy-driven disposal of data that is no longer required for legal, regulatory, or business purposes. Rational Governance enforces retention schedules, respects active legal holds, routes exceptions through approval workflows, and produces immutable audit logs of every disposition action — so you can prove to regulators, auditors, and opposing counsel that deletion was purposeful and compliant.

Administrators define retention schedules by record class, data source, jurisdiction, or business unit. Rational Governance applies those schedules automatically based on classification, metadata, and content, holding records for the required period and disposing of them when eligible. It supports DoD 5015.02-style records management, event-based retention, and multi-jurisdictional policies from one policy engine.

Rational Governance classifies content using a combination of pattern matching, dictionaries, entity extraction, metadata rules, and machine-learning models. Out-of-the-box classifiers identify PII, PHI, PCI, financial records, intellectual property, and other sensitive categories across documents, email, and attachments — and tag them so retention, access, and DLP policies can be applied consistently.

Rational Governance supports GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, HIPAA, HITECH, SOX, SEC 17a-4, FINRA, GLBA, FERPA, and state-level privacy laws. It addresses the core obligations these regulations share: know what data you hold, classify it, apply the right retention, honor data-subject rights, preserve for litigation, and dispose defensibly — with an auditable trail for every action.

For GDPR and CCPA/CPRA requests, Rational Governance searches across all connected repositories by identifier (name, email, employee ID, customer ID) to locate every document, message, and attachment referencing the subject. Privacy teams can export, redact, or erase results while respecting legal holds, dramatically cutting the time and cost of responding to data-subject access and deletion requests.

Rational Governance issues, tracks, and releases legal holds across connected data sources, preserves matching content in place, distributes custodian notices, tracks acknowledgments, and maintains a chain-of-custody audit trail. Preserving in place avoids the cost and risk of collection-based holds and helps prevent spoliation sanctions and adverse-inference rulings.

Yes. Rational Governance integrates natively with Rational Review, our eDiscovery platform, so identified data can flow directly into early case assessment, review, and production without re-collection. It also exports to standard load-file formats for use with other review platforms, shrinking the time between preservation and review.

Rational Governance connects to Microsoft 365 — Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams — as well as on-premises Exchange, Windows file shares, NAS, and major cloud object stores. Content is indexed and governed in place, so users keep working in their native tools while retention, classification, and holds are enforced centrally.

By continuously identifying ROT, dark data, duplicates, and data past retention, Rational Governance lets organizations defensibly dispose of material that carries storage cost, backup cost, and litigation exposure. Customers typically reclaim 30–50% of unstructured storage and reduce the attack surface for ransomware and data breaches at the same time.

Rational Governance surfaces where sensitive data lives, who has access, and whether it violates policy — complementing DLP and data security posture management (DSPM) tools. In a breach, it accelerates scoping: you can search indexed content to determine exactly what data was in an exposed repository and which individuals, record types, or jurisdictions are affected.

Unlike platforms focused on a single ecosystem or a single capability, Rational Governance unifies file analysis, records management, retention automation, privacy response, legal hold, and eDiscovery in one platform, across Microsoft 365 and non-Microsoft sources. It manages data in place without forced migration and is purpose-built for legal and compliance workflows, not just IT operations.

Yes. Rational Governance applies supervised and unsupervised machine learning for content classification, near-duplicate detection, concept clustering, and anomaly detection. AI-assisted classification scales across billions of documents, continuously improves with feedback from reviewers, and helps identify sensitive or high-risk content that rule-based classifiers miss.

Rational Governance can be deployed on-premises, in a customer-managed cloud, or as a hosted service. Most customers connect their first data sources and begin indexing within days, produce an initial data map and ROT report within the first few weeks, and start executing retention and defensible-deletion policies in the first quarter — with professional services available for policy design, migration, and custom classifiers.