AI-Ready Infrastructure for Critical Operations: Secure, Scalable, Compliant

Keep Operations Running. No Matter What.

IronShard delivers AI-ready, zero-trust storage built for mission-critical energy, utilities, and national infrastructure. Instantly segment IT and OT domains, enable real-time failover, automate regulatory compliance, and provide a robust AI metadata layer for LLM and predictive analytics workloads. Maintain operations and AI-driven insights in the face of disasters, ransomware, or nation-state threats.

The Challenge

Operators of critical infrastructure face unique, escalating pressures:

• Cyber-physical data threats: Ransomware, supply chain exploits, and nation-state actors.
• Strict regulations:
  • Energy: EU NIS2, IEC 62443, DOE, NERC CIP
  • Privacy: GDPR, CCPA (if handling consumer data).
  • General security: ISO 27001, FedRAMP (if providing services to governments).
• Non-stop operations: Zero downtime tolerated for power grids, utilities, and public services.
• Data sovereignty, residency and cross-border flows. Local regulators often require “data stays in-country” assurances.
• AI and LLM adoption: Predictive maintenance, outage detection, fraud detection, and other AI/ML workflows demand high-performance, metadata-rich, and policy-enforced storage, supporting petabytes of telemetry from IoT and SCADA sensors.
• Petabytes of real-time telemetry: Smart grids, IoT sensors, and predictive analytics.
• OT/IT convergence: Integrating operational and enterprise IT creates potential lateral attack surfaces. Proper segmentation and governance are critical.

Our Approach: Fail-Safe, Zero-Trust Storage

Edge-to-Cloud AI Security

• Zero-trust, encrypted, fragmented storage at the edge (sensors, OT gateways, or control centers).
• Policy-enforced AI agent access: AI agents interact only with datasets they are authorized to use. No plaintext data ever leaves your control.
• Audit-ready AI operations: Every training, inference, and data restore action is logged and traceable for regulatory compliance.

Compliance and AI Governance by Default

• Built-in adherence to EU NIS2, IEC 62443, ISO 27001, and the EU AI Act.
• Automated compliance packs for audits, incidents, or failovers.
• Continuous alignment with evolving AI regulations and standards.
• AI explainability: Full lineage and metadata capture for all training and inference datasets.

Data Sovereignty, Resilience & Object Storage

• Multi-region erasure-coded object storage minimizes blast radius from cyberattacks or outages.
• Operational and customer data can be pinned to specific nations, cloud regions, or on-premises nodes with audit-ready proof.
• Automatic failover ensures continuous operations, even under disaster or attack scenarios.
• Offload historical relational data to cost-efficient object storage, freeing high-performance tiers for AI workloads and real-time analytics.

AI Metadata Layer for LLMs and Predictive Workflows

• Every dataset and AI artifact is annotated with metadata, versioning, and lineage.
• AI agents access only compliance-tagged, GDPR-cleared datasets, ensuring ethical and legal AI operations.
• Optimized AI metadata layers accelerate LLM training, model evaluation, and predictive analytics without exposing raw data unnecessarily.
• Automated reports provide instant audit evidence for regulators.

OT/IT Segmentation and Governance

• Fine-grained, role-based access for SCADA, OT, IT, and regulatory teams.
• Strict separation of duties prevents lateral movement and insider risk.
• Comprehensive logging for all access, AI actions, and data modifications.

Air-Gapped Ransomware & Disaster Resilience

• Orchestrated backups across isolated environments ensure instant restore with zero data loss.
• ICS configurations and logs fully protected.
• AI pipelines and predictive models continue operating securely even during ransomware attacks.

AI Spotlight: Predictive Outage Prevention

A European utility deployed IronShard to power AI-driven outage prediction:

• All datasets and AI outputs encrypted, auditable, and policy-controlled.
• AI agents access only compliance-tagged datasets.
• Full lineage capture ensures reproducibility of every model training set.
• During audits, regulators receive instant proof of failover events, storage compliance, and AI activity.

Result: An outage-immune, explainable AI data architecture that keeps the grid running while complying with the strictest European and U.S. regulations.

From Data to Decisions: AI You Can Trust

IronShard ensures every AI decision is traceable, every dataset is compliant, and every outage is preventable.