Modern enterprises run on a patchwork of legacy record systems and cloud-native platforms. While the infrastructure has evolved, the data often hasn’t. It remains fragmented, siloed, governed inconsistently, and increasingly hard to trust or scale.

According to Gartner, more than 50% of organisations have faced a compliance audit. Meanwhile, PwC reports that only 22% of organisations use automated data discovery, leaving personal data exposed and complicating compliance. With only 53% of organisations satisfied with their data quality, the lack of a unified data strategy leads to:  

  • Redundant content and integration challenges across legacy systems
  • Inconsistent data governance policies and procedures
  • Limited access to trusted data for AI, analytics, or automation
  • Unclear data lineage, increasing the cost of audits and investigations

These issues increase risk, inflate costs and delay progress toward AI-ready data. For CDOs, CLOs, and transformation leaders, connecting legacy and modern systems is a key strategy for facilitating information governance, enhancing enterprise search, enabling metadata management, and implementing robust compliance solutions.

The challenge of hybrid data environments

Today’s enterprises rarely operate on a single platform. They span legacy archives, cloud-native apps, and everything in between. This hybrid reality brings flexibility, but it also introduces structural challenges that complicate governance, inflate costs, and limit the value of enterprise data:

Inconsistent classification and metadata

Only 30% of firms have a clearly defined data governance framework in place. Without aligned data governance policies and procedures, content is inconsistently tagged across systems, making it difficult to search, secure and trust.

Redundant storage and duplicated data

Fragmentation leads to overlapping systems, multiple versions of the same record, and unnecessary storage costs, which undermine data compliance solutions and create legal ambiguity. It’s estimated that bad data costs the U.S. economy around $3 trillion annually.

Broken data lineage and audit gaps

Gartner warns that 60% of organisations won’t realise the full value of AI by 2027 unless they update their data governance. Legacy setups often lack traceability. When records are moved or duplicated, organisations can lose track of what is official, current or compliant, which increases their legal and regulatory risks.

Limited discoverability for users and AI

GenAI initiatives can stall due to a lack of access to context-rich, discoverable content. When data is siloed or poorly indexed, even advanced AI models will struggle to provide trusted insights.

Organisations must break down silos, standardise classification, and connect data across systems to become AI-ready.

The EncompaaS solution: Unifying without migrating

Rather than a complete rip-and-replace, EncompaaS overlays existing infrastructure, providing federated governance across systems. This creates a unified data strategy that supports compliance, transformation, and continuity.

Federated access across platforms

EncompaaS integrates legacy systems, like OpenText and file shares, with modern platforms like Microsoft 365 and cloud storage, simplifying legacy system integration and allowing connected information governance without moving data.

Intelligent classification and metadata automation

Using AI-driven enrichment, EncompaaS applies consistent data classification and lifecycle rules across systems, aligning with your data governance policies, procedures, and data privacy software requirements.

Policy-driven governance at scale

From legal holds to retention policies, EncompaaS implements compliance solutions within existing systems, reducing duplication, cost, and risk while ensuring data stays where it is.

AI and automation systems can access clean, governed, and AI-ready data without a full-scale migration.

Strategic benefits of a unified data strategy

A fragmented data environment increases risk and slows innovation. Unifying your approach to data governance delivers business value:

Enterprise-wide visibility and trust

With centralised, policy-driven governance, EncompaaS provides stakeholders with a shared, governed view of enterprise content. This leads to faster decision-making, readiness for audits, and building trust in AI.

AI-ready data at scale

Clean, classified, and discoverable data fuels analytics, automation, and Genai. EncompaaS guarantees your AI-ready data is discoverable, enriched, and protected, without the need to restructure your environment.

Reduced redundancy and storage cost

By eliminating duplicates and applying defensible deletion, EncompaaS reduces storage overhead and operational complexity, aligning with your broader data compliance solutions and sustainability goals.

Strengthened compliance and data integrity

EncompaaS enforces consistent data governance policies and procedures across all systems, ensuring legal holds, retention, and defensible deletion are applied uniformly, even in legacy environments. 

A unified data strategy is how modern enterprises scale responsibly.

Realising value beyond compliance

A unified data strategy also accelerates value across the business. Once data is connected, classified, and enriched, it becomes easier to spot duplication, surface missed insights, and automate routine tasks.

This unlocks downstream benefits in:

  1. Knowledge reuse: Teams can repurpose existing decisions, documents or customer interactions, reducing rework and improving response times.
  2. Faster onboarding: With clean, contextual data, new hires, AI models, and external partners can engage with confidence from day one.
  3. Reduced operational drag: Federated search and lifecycle rules simplify record management and cut time wasted hunting for information or resolving duplication.

EncompaaS supports CIOs and compliance leaders beyond the initial implementation. By automating data cleanup and governance enforcement, it creates compounding gains, reducing admin overhead, improving user experience, and supporting proactive innovation.

Bridging the old and the new

For too long, legacy and modern systems have operated in silos. This has stalled innovation, increased compliance risks, and slowed the shift to AI. EncompaaS offers a smarter way forward.

EncompaaS combines a unified data strategy with intelligent governance across legacy and cloud platforms. It ensures consistent information governance, strong compliance solutions, and AI-ready data trusted by legal, compliance, and analytics teams.

Explore how the EncompaaS intelligent information management platform turns disconnected data into AI-ready insight.