Summit 2024: Ctera Expansion into AI with Data Intelligence Offering for Smart Storage

At Summit 2024, its annual customer event, Ctera Netwotks Ltd. announced an offering designed to enable secure enterprise AI grounded with knowledge generated from distributed, unstructured data sources.

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With Ctera Data Intelligence organizations can connect their file storage to their AI system of choice, providing it with real-time private context, while enforcing file permissions, preventing data leakage, and ensuring complete data privacy.

As enterprises race towards wide-scale AI adoption, they face significant challenges in making it business-relevant and security-compliant. While AI services offer some methods for uploading files, these integrations fall short in their ability to handle live enterprise file storage, inflict extensive network and compute overhead, and expose organizations to sensitive data leakage to unauthorized internal and external users.

The company addresses these challenges by extending its hybrid cloud data platform to process, scan, and ingest unstructured data, transforming it into semantically indexed knowledge that can be used with any AI service, and can be deployed within the customer’s infrastructure of choice, ranging from public or hybrid to fully private cloud.

Key capabilities of Data Intelligence include:

• AI that knows your data: A semantic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) engine that uses the Ctera Notification API to constantly update its knowledge with live data sources.
• Identity-based enforcement: Restricts AI data visibility based on the granular file-level access permissions (ACLs) of the currently logged-in user.
• AI experts: Customizable virtual assistants with predefined characters and domain-specific knowledge scope
• Fully private: On-premises option for organizations that wish to keep their data and LLM 100% private.
• Distributed ingestion: In-cloud and edge data processing using the Ctera Direct protocol, eliminating costly egress fees and eliminating latency impact.
• OpenAI and Microsoft Copilot integration: Agentic extensions for popular AI services with SSO authentication.

“With Ctera Data Intelligence, we combine our expertise in secure file services, connecting distributed object and file data sources with automated AI data processing,” said Oded Nagel, CEO. “We’re enabling AI that truly understands your data – delivering relevant, up-to-date insights grounded in the unique context of your enterprise, all while ensuring the highest levels of data privacy and security.“

“The success and progress of enterprise AI projects are very much linked to the data quality including classification, security, and data governance requirements,” said Camberley Bates, chief technology advisor, The Futurum Group. “These issues are particularly challenging for large enterprises as they work to integrate solutions amidst a complex web of existing storage systems and access rights. By directly addressing these requirements, Ctera Data Intelligence has the potential to significantly accelerate AI adoption across the enterprise landscape.“

Ctera Data Intelligence is currently in early access.

Resource:
Blog: Introducing Ctera Data Intelligence