Arctera Insight Platform now includes LLM data protection
The latest update to Arctera's data auditing software supports public LLM usage for organizations with features like masking, logging and message summaries.
Arctera is adding new capabilities to protect and secure private information or corporate secrets from leaking into public large language model services such as ChatGPT.
Arctera Insight Platform, the company's compliance and auditing platform, gained a handful of features today around logging, blocking and quarantining public LLM service usage. Insight now logs user prompts and communications with public LLM services, allowlists specific public LLMs for users, and summarizes and catalogs interactions for auditing, according to the vendor.
The platform, previously known as the Data Compliance Platform, was part of a technology collection spun off from Arctera's former parent company, Veritas, which merged with Cohesity in 2024.
Arctera was formed shortly thereafter to continue selling and supporting Insight, as well as the cloud backup service Backup Exec and InfoScale, for high-availability software-defined storage. The company includes former Veritas employees and executives, such as Arctera CEO Lawrence Wong.
Arctera's customers include SMBs and smaller enterprises with fewer than 5,000 or so employees that likely cannot afford to customize and tune an LLM or foundational model, due to a lack of either knowledge or workforce, said Jerome Wendt, CEO and principal analyst at Data Center Intelligence Group.
Enabling employees to use public LLM services, while also establishing some guardrails or protections, can help expedite AI usage and integration into workflows, he said.
"It gives those SMB-sized businesses access to that technology," Wendt said. "They're not as complex and don't have as many people, so Arctera is able to go into those environments and address those challenges."
These new updates are included for new and existing Insight customers, and the platform is priced per user, according to Arctera.
Public LLM protection
Supported LLM services at launch today include ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. Arctera Insight Platform can capture and log data entered by users into these public LLMs alongside more than 120 existing supported data sources, such as WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams.
The update also includes a new browser plugin capability that automatically masks personally identifiable information or other sensitive data that users might accidentally include in a prompt. This capability enables the use of other AI services while establishing guardrails against misuse, according to Arctera.
Stopping accidental leaks at the source is a good first security step, especially as more organizations start using AI tools and lean on popular LLM services, said Ray Lucchesi, founder and president of Silverton Consulting, an IT analyst firm.
They're trying to plug the hole from the prompt.
Ray LucchesiFounder and president, Silverton Consulting
Prompt protection is a good first line of defense, but compliance specialists should also anticipate that employees could get around blocklists and use LLM services with company data, he said.
"They're trying to plug the hole from the prompt," Lucchesi said. "Capturing is a good first step, [but] a whitelist isn't a secure, ironclad solution."
Arctera will expand the platform further with InsightBooks, a new feature available in today's update. InsightBooks can summarize and consolidate entries across communication channels like messages, automated transcripts and LLM prompts. The capability can then create reports and summaries around specific phrases and keywords.
Many of these features will help Arctera's SMB customers embrace more AI usage, a key business differentiator in the year to come, Wendt said.
"Any organization that isn't looking at how to use AI to accelerate [workflows] will have to in order to remain competitive in the coming years," he said.
Lucchesi said the major challenge facing Arctera will be expanding the number of supported LLM platforms in Insight as different organizations or departments within those organizations all find their own AI tools.
"There's a lot more players in this space other than ChatGPT," Lucchesi said. "It's the 1,000-pound gorilla at the moment, but there are others going after it."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
