Governance and Compliance for Regulated Data

Govern Regulated Data at the Speed and Scale of AI

SEC retention, GDPR residency, and FINRA audit rules assume records sit still. AI regularly moves the same regulated data through a warehouse, a vector index, a stream, and a GPU cluster. VAST enforces encryption at rest, immutability, access control, and audit at the data layer, so governance follows every byte across files, tables, streams, and vectors.

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Exported from Figma "Use Case Compliance" (CR-12352)
The Regulated Data Challenge

Governance Used to Be a Checkpoint. AI Made It Continuous.

Regulators expect you to prove who touched sensitive data, when, and why, and to keep records intact against tampering and loss. That worked when a quarterly audit could inspect data that had been sitting still. AI pipelines copy the same records across a warehouse, a vector store, a streaming tier, and a dozen sandboxes, and they do it constantly. A control that only checks the state of data periodically cannot govern data that changes location and shape continuously.

Copies Break the Audit Trail

Sensitive records get duplicated into the warehouse, the vector index, and analyst sandboxes. Each copy drifts from its source, and no single system can answer who accessed what, or show a record was never altered.

Residency Rules Fight Global Scale

GDPR and national privacy laws say data stays in-region, but AI training and analytics want it everywhere at once. Enforcing residency across sites and clouds turns into manual policy stitching that auditors distrust.

Retention and Immutability Bolted On

SEC 17a-4 and FINRA demand write-once records and long retention, yet most platforms enforce this in an add-on layer that a misconfiguration or a stolen admin credential can bypass. Proving compliance becomes a forensic exercise.

The Korean government asked SK Telecom to develop a sovereign AI Cloud, meaning that AI computing environment that is fully controlled domestically for security and strategic reasons.

Dr. Jian Li
Manager, Cloud R&D, SK Telecom
Why Now

Governance Can No Longer Live Outside the Data

Compliance used to be a perimeter and a process. Put regulated data in a system of record. Wrap it in access reviews and retention policies. Let a quarterly audit confirm the wrapper held. The data sat still long enough for the process to catch up.

Then AI started moving that same data continuously, from source systems into warehouses, into vector indexes for retrieval, into streaming tiers for real-time features, and into GPU clusters for training. Every hop is another copy, another credential, another jurisdiction. A governance layer that sits apart from the data cannot see any of it, let alone control it.

VAST puts the control inside the data. The Disaggregated and Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture keeps files, objects, tables, streams, and vectors as native Elements in one global namespace, so there is one authoritative copy to govern rather than many drifting duplicates. Encryption at rest, immutable snapshots, fine-grained access control, and audit stop being external wrappers and become behaviors of the data itself. Row- and column-level access is evaluated at the data layer against the same identity and policy for every access path, whether a query, a model retrieval, or an agent call, and access and changes are auditable over that one governed copy.

Now the control moves with the data. Analyst query, model retrieval, or agent action, the same policy, the same audit trail, and the same residency rules apply everywhere the record goes.

Exported from Figma "Use Case Compliance" (CR-12352)
The VAST AI Operating System

One Governed Namespace for Every Regulated Workload

The VAST AI Operating System consolidates files, objects, tables, streams, and vectors into a single namespace on the DASE architecture. Governance stops being a layer you maintain and becomes a behavior of the platform. VAST DataBase evaluates access at the row and column level against one identity and policy, and VAST DataSpace carries those controls across sites, clouds, and edge locations without copying data out of policy.

Govern One Copy, Not Many

Files, tables, streams, and vectors live as native Elements in one namespace. There is a single authoritative record to secure, retain, and audit, instead of duplicates scattered across silos that each need their own controls.

Enforce Access at the Data Layer

VAST DataBase evaluates fine-grained access against the same identity and policy for every access path, so who-touched-what is answered against one governed copy rather than reconstructed from scattered application logs after an incident.

Keep Residency Under Control

VAST DataSpace pins data to a region while still presenting a global namespace, so teams collaborate and burst to cloud without moving regulated bytes out of the jurisdiction that law requires.

Keep Records Immutable

Immutable, indestructible, write-once (WORM) snapshots and retention are enforced by the storage engine, designed to prevent records from being tampered with, deleted, or encrypted by ransomware, whether through a misconfiguration, an operator error, or a stolen credential.

How Governance Travels With the Data

Encryption, Access Control, Immutability, and Residency, Built In

Governance on VAST is not a product you bolt on. It is how the platform stores, moves, and serves every byte. Here is what that looks like across the four controls regulators care about most.

Access Control and Audit in the DataBase

Traditional stacks record access in application logs that live apart from the data, so proving who read a sensitive column means correlating systems that were never designed to agree. VAST DataBase evaluates row- and column-level access against the same identity and policy on every access path, over the same tables that serve analytics, vectors, and AI retrieval. Access and changes are auditable at the data layer, so lineage and audit are properties of the governed namespace rather than a forensic reconstruction across tools. The result is a single, authoritative audit trail over one governed copy that answers an auditor’s question directly.

Exported from Figma "Use Case Compliance" (CR-12352)

Immutability and Retention in the Storage Engine

Most platforms enforce write-once retention in a software tier above storage, where a configuration change or a compromised admin can quietly weaken it. VAST writes immutable, indestructible snapshots and retention policies into the storage engine itself, on the all-flash tier where the data lives. The result is that SEC 17a-4 and FINRA records stay intact against tampering and deletion, and clean recovery from ransomware runs on the primary tier at flash speed.

Exported from Figma "Use Case Compliance" (CR-12352)

Residency and Federation With DataSpace

Global collaboration usually fights data residency, because the only way to share is to copy, and every copy risks landing in the wrong jurisdiction. VAST DataSpace presents one global namespace while pinning each dataset to its required region, using synchronous and asynchronous replication and Global Clones under policy control. The result is that teams across sites and clouds work from the same governed data, and GDPR or national residency rules are enforced by the platform rather than by manual process.

Exported from Figma "Use Case Compliance" (CR-12352)
Why VAST DataBase?

Governance Native to the Warehouse

VAST DataBase is a unified transactional and analytical warehouse that serves rows, tables, and vectors from one engine on NVMe flash. Because governance runs inside the database rather than around it, access evaluation, audit, and retention apply to every query, every model retrieval, and every agent action over the same governed tables, with no separate vector store or duplicate estate to secure.

Row and Column Access Control

The engine evaluates fine-grained permissions against one identity and policy for both analytics and AI, so a data scientist and an agent see what the data policy allows, over the same tables rather than per-tool configurations that drift apart.

Access Control on Every Query

The same identity and policy govern every query, retrieval, and agent action over one governed copy, so who touched what and when is answerable against a single authoritative audit trail instead of stitched-together logs from separate systems.

Governed Vectors, No Silo

Vectors live inside VAST DataBase with integrated vector search, so RAG and inference retrieval inherit the same access evaluation, audit, and retention as your regulated tables. The vector store is one governed component, not a separate product to secure on its own.

What does VAST DataSpace help regulated teams do?

Carry Governance Across Sites, Clouds, and Edge

VAST DataSpace is the globally distributed namespace and data-computing layer that spans on-premises, cloud, and edge. For regulated organizations, it is how residency, access, and audit policy follow data as it moves, so a global business can collaborate and reach cloud GPUs without copying regulated bytes out of the jurisdiction, or the policy, that governs them.

Pin Data to a Region

Present one global namespace while keeping each dataset physically in its required region, so GDPR and national privacy rules are enforced by the platform even as teams work across borders.

Replicate Under Policy

Synchronous and asynchronous replication and Global Clones move only what policy permits, so disaster recovery and collaboration never quietly create a copy in the wrong jurisdiction.

Burst Without Losing Control

Reach cloud GPUs and analytics without a copy-first migration, avoiding egress double-pay and keeping the same access evaluation and audit trail active wherever the workload runs.

Governance and Compliance in Action

Regulated Industries Running on One Governed Platform

Governance requirements differ by sector, but the pattern is the same: prove control over sensitive data while still serving it to analytics and AI at scale. Here is how VAST applies across the most heavily regulated industries.