Cloudera Anywhere Cloud gives AI agents safe, secure access to sensitive data wherever it lives
Big-data company Cloudera Inc. says it’s going to eliminate the headaches and hassles that have slowed enterprise’s efforts to adopt artificial intelligence with today’s launch of its new Cloudera Anywhere Cloud platform.
It’s targeted at agentic AI workloads, namely the autonomous AI agents that go further than regular chatbots by performing work on behalf of humans. By using Cloudera Anywhere Cloud, organizations can give their AI agents safe, governed access to their most sensitive data, no matter where it lives, be it in the public cloud, on-premises, in a sovereign cloud environment or at the network edge. It’s paving the way for AI agents to work in any location, without restrictions.
Cloudera says this kind of thing is desperately needed. While organizations are desperate to operationalize AI agents, they’re confounded by infrastructure challenges. Those AI agents need access to corporate data to be able to perform the work they’re being asked to do, but that’s difficult to provide given the fragmented nature of most enterprise data environments. One of the hardest challenges to solve is the strong data sovereignty regulations in places such as Europe. There are also basic cybersecurity risks to consider and the problem of slow platform upgrade cycles. In a recent study, Cloudera found that 73% of information technology leaders blamed infrastructure performance constraints for hindering their AI projects.
When it comes to AI, most data is processed in the cloud. But the idea of feeding massive volumes of sensitive information into proprietary cloud environments is a non-starter for many organizations because of the above challenges. As a result, many AI projects have stalled at the starting gates.
With Cloudera Anywhere Cloud, Cloudera believes it can get around these bottlenecks once and for all by bringing push-button simplicity and cloud-native agility to corporate data wherever it resides. It eliminates the need for companies to funnel their data into a centralized cloud environment. Instead, they can safely let their agents access their data where it currently lives, ensuring they can continue to adhere to strict data sovereignty regulations and avoid taking any unnecessary security risks.
Chief Product Officer Leo Brunnick told SiliconANGLE that enterprise AI has outgrown the public cloud-only model formerly used by enterprises. “Organizations shouldn’t have to choose between innovation and control,” he said. “Cloudera Anywhere Cloud brings the speed and flexibility of the cloud directly to enterprise data, allowing customers to accelerate AI initiatives while maintaining complete ownership of it, with optimized cost of infrastructure and tokens.”
Cloudera Anywhere Cloud does this by transforming data environments into a kind of open marketplace. It uses a unified application programming interface and the open-standards Apache Iceberg table format to connect multiple analytics engines to data wherever it lives, without the need for custom integrations. Companies can deploy tools such as Apache Spark, Kafka or Trino on their data, as well as third-party tools, and analyze it in place to fuel their AI agents. The process is simplified through the use of Cloudera’s own AI agent, a plain language chatbot that allows users to simply describe what they need. Those requests will be converted into automated data workflows, the company explained. The platform also employs zero-trust governance to ensure both compliance and unbroken data lineage.
Brunnick said Anywhere Cloud essentially brings AI to the data, wherever it resides, which makes it an ideal solution for agentic workloads need the ability to query data rapidly, with next to zero latency. “We activate the data where it lives,” he explained. “For on-premises, this could mean running Anywhere Cloud and AI Inferencing with a fine-tuned LLM locally. For Sovereign Clouds, this could mean using Anywhere Cloud directly inside the sovereign cloud ecosystem. And for the edge, we help customers run AI across near and far edge environments, operating on the device itself when necessary.”
The platform also caters to organizations that need their AI systems to span data held in multiple clouds, Brunnick said. In such cases, Anywhere Cloud provides additional capabilities to either federate data when latency is less of a concern, or replicate and stream data to the AI when low latency is required. In addition, some early adopters have created multi-agent workloads, using Anywhere Cloud to co-locate their agents in multiple data environments before reasoning and making decisions across clouds and data centers.
“It’s this last capability that really makes solving the latency problem possible, because Anywhere Cloud runs identically wherever it is applied,” Brunnick said. “A single software stack seamlessly brings together datasets and AI across edge, data center, sovereign cloud and public cloud environments, and it accomplishes this without ever forcing a data move or adding unnecessary latency to mission-critical agentic workflows.”
The other key advantage of Anywhere Cloud is that it enables AI to be run on data that organizations cannot store in the cloud at all, because of regulatory requirements that stipulate it must remain under their exclusive control. It can also serve organizations whose business operations are better run on premises in their own data centers. “For example, in banking and financial institutions, things like high-frequency trading systems, real-time fraud and real-time risk systems tend to remain on-premises or co-located with exchanges,” Brunnick said. “In telecommunications, network equipment such as 5G towers and edge devices physically cannot live in the cloud.”
“Instead of discounting that data and saying it’s out of reach for AI applications, Anywhere Cloud allows Cloudera to safely and securely activate it for AI use cases without violating sovereignty or regulatory requirements,” Brunnick added.
The graph analytics startup Puppygraph Inc. has been using Cloudera Anywhere Cloud in early access to help its customers run AI workloads without moving their data first. It uses the platform to query Iceberg-based data as a knowledge graph. Because the data remains in place, it retains all of the complex relationships and context that AI agents need to properly understand it.
Puppygraph Chief Executive Weimo Liu said this is key, because AI agents can’t reason over rows and joins alone. “Agents need to query knowledge, including the ontology, entities, relationships and context,” he explained. “With Cloudera Anywhere Cloud delivering trusted, Iceberg-based data across clouds, data centers and the edge, we can query that same data as a knowledge graph in real time with no ETL or data movement.”
Image: SiliconANGLE/Gemini
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