Your Buckets, Our Intelligence, Zero Compromise

Keep full custody of your data if you choose to.

IronShard is the only AI-ready storage layer that lets organisations bring their own buckets and maintain complete ownership while adding an AI governance and security layer on top. Your data stays in buckets you own and under your control at all times. IronShard provides the intelligence layer, not the custody.

Your data. Your custody. AI-ready intelligence.

Eliminate cloud lock-in, opaque governance, and single-provider exposure. With IronShard, your organization keeps data in the storage providers and regions of your choice, while IronShard makes that data discoverable, auditable, safe for AI agents and accessible via the standard S3 interface.

AI-ready + compliant

IronShard turns siloed buckets into AI-ready datasets without breaking governance. We make data discoverable and usable by AI agents while enforcing essential controls:

  • Lineage & Traceability: See where data came from, who touched it, and how it’s been transformed.
  • Detailed Access Logs: Full audit trails for every AI query and human access.
  • Region Controls & Restricted Sharing: Restrict which regions, accounts or tenants can access particular datasets.
  • Policy Enforcement: Configurable policies that prevent risky sharing and preserve regulatory requirements.

Secure by Design

We assume no single provider or region is perfectly safe. IronShard converts data to redundant erasure-coded fragments and distributes these encrypted fragments across multiple providers and regions, so:

  • No single provider can reconstruct your files.
  • Regional or even entire provider outages don’t make your data unavailable.
  • Each fragment is encrypted and unreadable without your keys and the IronShard coordination layer.

Optimised for Performance

Intelligence without added latency: IronShard uses ML-driven storage optimisation to keep performance consistent and predictable:

  • Predictive Caching so that hot data is available where agents need it.
  • Region-Aware Routing to shorten round trips and respect locality rules.
  • Smart Prefetching tailored to AI access patterns to reduce cold reads and cost.
  • Traffic-based Rebalancing moves data fragments where they are typically accessed from

How it works

  1. Connect Your Buckets: Attach existing storage endpoints (S3/GCS/Azure, etc.) using credentials you control.
  2. Index & Govern: IronShard builds a secure, searchable index and applies governance policies (lineage, retention, access rules).
  3. Fragment & Distribute: objects are encrypted, split, and stored across configured buckets to remove single-point exposure.
  4. Serve intelligence: AI agents query the IronShard intelligence layer, which performs authorized assembly, decryption checks, and returns safe, auditable results — without IronShard ever taking custody of the original files.

Benefits for your team

For Security & Compliance

  • Minimise vendor risk and demonstrate separation of custody.
  • Maintain cryptographic control with keys under your management.
  • Produce audit trails for regulators and internal auditors.

For Data Science & AI Teams

  • Faster model iteration — discover and combine data across buckets with a single, queryable layer.
  • Safe access controls ensure models only see what they are permitted to see.
  • Lower friction for doing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) while preserving compliance.

For IT & Platform

  • Avoid cloud lock-in and keep existing storage investments.
  • Reduce blast radius: fragmentation and multi-region storage increase resilience.
  • Centralised governance without replatforming.

FAQs

Q1: Does IronShard ever copy or move my raw data out of my buckets?
A: No. IronShard indexes and orchestrates access, and stores encrypted fragments across providers only if you enable fragmentation. Your original copies remain in your buckets unless you configure a migration policy.

Q2: What happens if a provider goes down?
A: Because data is fragmented and distributed, IronShard can reconstruct files from remaining fragments (subject to your configured resilience levels) and route access to available regions.

Q3: How does IronShard support audit and compliance?
A: We provide immutable audit logs, lineage tracking, and exportable reports to demonstrate access, transformations, and policy enforcement.