Airbyte Enterprise Flex enables you to keep your AI data safe

AI, in theory, can be a big help in getting work done. The reality, as we now know, is messier. One of the problems keeping AI from being more useful, though, is the inability of AI to safely use your private data is being addressed by Airbyte, the open-source data company, with its newest program: Enterprise Flex.

Enterprise Flex delivers data sovereignty and cloud flexibility for enterprises deploying AI and analytics at a global scale. It enables organizations to manage and activate their data with complete control via a unified cloud-based control plane while ensuring that critical data never leaves your company’s environment. With it, even if you have data silos located in multiple regions and infrastructure types—on-premises, private cloud, or multi-cloud — you can manage all their data safely. 

How? By decoupling the control plane (management interface) from the data plane (where data physically moves), you can manage integrations in the cloud while your actual data stays within their secure infrastructure.

With this approach, your sensitive data remains within a company’s regional infrastructure. This way, you can continue to meet each location's strict regulatory and privacy requirements.

The program serves as a bridge between AI applications and data. This bridge is built from "source connectors," which connect to the APIs, files, databases, or data warehouses from which you want to pull data. "Destination connectors" are the data warehouses, data lakes, databases, or analytics tools to which you want to push data. Airbyte and its partners supply over 600 of these connectors with a no-code AI-powered connector builder, so you can easily deploy them wherever you need them.

The platform’s new Data Activation feature, AKA often referred to as reverse Extract, Transform, Load (ETL), enables users to move their data back and forth into business-critical applications for AI and analytics use cases. This lets you push insights directly from data warehouses into business apps, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, an in-house AI engine, or what have you. As the company boasts, this gives "Your AI agents context in minutes."

Earlier versions enabled you to replicate your data from a list of source connectors (APIs, DBs, files, or your own custom connector) to destination connectors (data warehouses, lakes, or databases). It integrates with dbt for the transformation part at the destination level, and with data orchestrators such as Prefect, Dagster, and Airflow. This latest version, with the rise of AI, was the next logical step.

Companies can deploy Enterprise Flex globally and train AI models within their own environment. With data activation and increased speed, AI innovation continues to progress rapidly, accompanied by enhanced data protection. This is in addition to the logistical and support advantages Airbyte Flex offers by decoupling the control plane, which determines how data is managed, routed, and processed, from the data plane, which is responsible for actually moving the data.

To keep the data safe, all data pipelines use enterprise-grade encryption for data in transit, including TLS/SSL and HTTPS channels, to prevent unauthorized access during transfers. Airbyte also supports granular, role-based access control (RBAC) and single sign-on (SSO), letting administrators restrict who can interact with connections and datasets. Finally, it includes comprehensive audit logging and workspace isolation, helping teams maintain visibility and separation across projects and roles, strengthening security postures.

Airbyte Flex uses the quasi-open-source Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2). The core difference between this and a true open-source license is that you can't offer the program's resources as a managed service. You can, of course, use it within your own company. 

If you can live with that license, Airbyte’s open-core architecture offers all its important features, including deployment flexibility, data connectors, and protocol support, as part of a single, unified, community-driven codebase. Enterprises can access, self-host, and extend the software without vendor lock-in.

Airbyte, as I'm sure you figured out by now, will be happy to run Flex Enterprise for you. The service is available now. 

Michel Tricot, CEO and co-founder of Airbyte, explained, “Flex simplifies data infrastructure, taking deployments from months to days while delivering true data sovereignty to solve the fragmentation problem that prevents organizations from realizing the full value of their data. With hybrid deployments, organizations can integrate and activate data wherever it lives, cloud or on-prem,  without the burden of heavy infrastructure management. Flex makes that data AI-ready by default, enabling companies to power AI securely and seamlessly.”

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