Cloud security startup Sentra Inc. today announced that it has added support for large language models in its data classification engine, allowing enterprises to identify and understand sensitive unstructured data such as employee contracts, source code and user-generated content.

The added support for LLMs allows businesses to understand the business context of unstructured customer data clearly. Sentra’s new approach to classification is also said to enable enterprises to align with compliance benchmarks, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Sentra argues that today’s complex, multicloud data landscape makes it challenging for enterprises to classify and build a comprehensive catalog of sensitive unstructured data with a meaningful business context. The company also claims that enterprises that rush to harness the power of artificial intelligence need to safeguard against unauthorized users or applications manipulating LLMs while ensuring that they can detect and respond to security risks related to training AI models.

With the added support for LLMs, Sentra’s platform now automatically understands proprietary customer data with additional contexts like data sovereignty and region, how the data will be used and how it should be protected. In one example, a company can create data security policies that ensure employee agreements are only accessed by human resources or that legal contracts are stored within a legal department’s SharePoint site.

Sentra scans data with LLM-based within the cloud premises of an enterprise, creating comprehensive data that can be prioritized with risk scoring that takes multiple data layers into account, including data access permissions, activity, sensitivity, movement and misconfigurations. Doing so gives enterprises greater visibility and control over their data risk management processes.

Other features of the release include LLM-powered scanning of data asset content and analysis of metadata, like file names, schemas and tags. The release allows enterprises to train their LLMs and plug them into Sentra’s classification engine to classify proprietary data better.

Sentra was previously in the news in January when it raised $30 million in a Series A financing. Investors in the company include Standard Investments, Munich Re Ventures LLC, Moore Strategic Ventures LLC, Xerox Ventures LLC and INT3 Ventures Inc., Bessemer Venture Partners LP and Zeev Ventures LLC.

Image: Sentra