Cloudera unveils data security & AI solutions to enhance innovation

Cloudera has announced the launch of two new solutions aimed at enhancing data security and accelerating AI deployment. These solutions were introduced at the Cloudera EVOLVE24 event held in Dubai.

One of the new offerings, the Cloudera Private Link Network, is designed to address data security and privacy challenges for organisations operating in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals. The platform is designed to offer a secure connection between customer workloads and the Cloudera control plane, thus ensuring that data does not traverse the public internet. This move is aimed at ensuring data integrity and reducing the likelihood of data exposure.

Dipto Chakravarty, Chief Product Officer at Cloudera, emphasised the importance of the new offering, stating, "Cloudera Private Link Network is purpose-built and managed by Cloudera to address enterprise privacy and connectivity concerns. By offloading the management of Private Link Network to Cloudera, it will both lower TCO for your organisation and free up valuable resources, allowing you to focus on strategic business initiatives."

The Cloudera Private Link Network integrates with major cloud providers, leveraging existing services like AWS PrivateLink and Azure Private Link. This integration facilitates secure data transfer across multiple cloud environments, providing consistent security and streamlined management. Users can efficiently provision services using the Cloudera Command Line Interface.

Industry analyst Sanjeev Mohan remarked on the new solution's significance, stating, "As organisations move to cross-cloud deployments, they expect to drastically reduce the complexity of multi-platform configurations to a point that they should only have to specify private link network endpoints between their control plane and the data planes. Private Link Network helps enterprises protect their data more effectively and easily leverage disparate clouds to reduce total cost of ownership."

The second solution introduced by Cloudera is a suite of Accelerators for ML Projects (AMPs). These accelerators aim to reduce the time-to-value for enterprise AI use cases by providing enterprises with advanced AI techniques and examples that can be deployed swiftly. The AMPs encapsulate industry-leading practices for tackling complex ML challenges, ensuring that enterprises can effectively integrate AI into their operations.

Steven Dickens, Chief Technology Advisor at The Futurum Group, commented on the AMPs, saying, "While almost every business is experimenting with Generative AI, the technology is still so new that there are very few best practices for enterprises. As a result, it's common practice for data scientists and AI engineers to build on existing examples when starting new AI projects. However, there are many drawbacks with this approach, including added security and legal risks. AMPs remove this ambiguity by providing fully built, end-to-end solutions that give data scientists a ready-to-go MVP for various AI use cases that are proven to be effective and able to quickly drive value."

The Accelerators for ML Projects include several new updates, such as the Fine-Tuning Studio, which provides an application for managing, fine-tuning, and evaluating LLMs. Other updates include RAG with Knowledge Graph for capturing relationships and context, PromptBrew for creating high-performing and reliable prompts, and Chat with Your Documents, which enhances LLM responses using internal knowledge bases.

Chakravarty also commented on the significance of the new AMPs, stating, "In today's environment, enterprises are constrained with time and resources to get AI projects off the ground. Our AMPs are catalysts to fast-track AI projects from concept to reality with pre-built solutions and working examples, ensuring that use cases are dependable and cost-effective, while reducing development time. This enables enterprises to swiftly experience the productivity gains and efficiencies that come from AI initiatives."