AI-Ready Infrastructure for Critical Operations

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
  • General security: ISO 27001, FedRAMP
• 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 residency limitations.
• AI and LLM adoption: Predictive maintenance, outage detection, fraud detection, and other AI/ML workflows demand high-performance, metadata-rich, and policy-enforced storage.
• Petabytes of real-time telemetry: Smart grids, IoT and SCADA sensors, and predictive analytics.
• OT/IT convergence: Integrating operational and enterprise IT creates potential lateral attack surfaces. Proper segmentation and governance are critical.

IronShard's Approach: Fail-Safe, Zero-Trust Storage

Edge-to-Cloud AI Security

• Zero-trust, encrypted, distributed 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 compliance with EU NIS2, IEC 62443, ISO 27001, the EU AI Act, GDPR, and other industry-specific regulations.
• Automated audit trails for data access, incidents, and failovers.
• Continuous alignment with evolving AI regulations and standards.
• AI decision explainability: Full lineage and metadata for all training and inference datasets.

Data Sovereignty and Resilience

• Multi-region, erasure-coded storage that minimizes the blast radius from cyberattacks or outages.
• Data geo-pinning to specific nations, cloud regions, or on-premises nodes with audit-ready proof.
• Automatic failover ensures continuous operations, even under disaster or attack scenarios.

AI Auditability and Versioning

• Versioning and lineage enable easy rollbacks and dataset-to-AI-output mapping.
• Automated reports provide instant audit evidence for regulators.
• Every dataset and AI artefact is annotated with metadata for quick data discoverability, LLM training, model evaluation, and predictive analytics.

OT/IT Segmentation and Governance

• Fine-grained, role-based data 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 and Disaster Resilience

• Instant data restore with zero loss with orchestrated backups across isolated environments.
• Fully protected ICS configurations and logs.
• Ransomware-resilient AI pipelines and predictive models.

Use Case: Predictive Outage Prevention

IronShard is chosen by a European utility company as the basis for their AI-driven power outage system. The project requirements include that all datasets and AI outputs are encrypted, every data action is logged, and data access is policy-controlled. Various AI models must be explainable and reproducible, with a full lineage of AI training datasets. Auditors and regulators require instant proof of storage compliance and evidence of failover events and AI activity.

From Data to Decisions: AI You Can Trust

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