Airbyte launches Enterprise Flex for secure AI-ready data control

Airbyte has announced the release of Airbyte Enterprise Flex, a data movement platform designed to give organisations sovereignty and control over their data for artificial intelligence and analytics projects.

Airbyte Enterprise Flex offers organisations the capability to deploy in a variety of environments, including on-premises data centres, public cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid cloud setups. The solution has been positioned to meet the needs of global organisations with data dispersed across multiple regions, while maintaining compliance with data protection regulations and reducing operational overheads and total cost of ownership (TCO).

The company has stated that with this platform, sensitive data never leaves the customer's environment. This approach is intended to maximise privacy and security, which is particularly relevant for companies dealing with strict compliance or regulatory demands.

Deployment flexibility

Flex is architected on a unified codebase, providing customers with the full feature set of Airbyte's data movement services regardless of how or where they choose to deploy. The company noted that this contrasts with offerings that operate across different technologies, where functionality and feature consistency are not guaranteed, leading to increased maintenance overhead and hurdles when switching deployment models.

"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," said Michel Tricot, CEO and co-founder of Airbyte. "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."

One of Flex's core principles is that it moves the data but never stores it, giving organisations peace of mind regarding data control. By decoupling the control plane - which manages data routing, processing, and policy enforcement - from the data plane - which transports the data - customers retain control over data residency, allowing sensitive information to stay within chosen infrastructure and closer to processing locations. This design also has the potential to reduce data latency for enterprise workloads.

Reverse ETL for business applications

Alongside Airbyte Enterprise Flex, the company introduced a data activation capability, commonly referred to as reverse ETL. This new feature enables organisations to move processed data back into business-critical applications such as Salesforce and Hubspot.

This functionality can be used to deliver application-ready data to AI agents, providing metadata and context efficiently for AI-driven business workflows. Data Activation is currently available for Hubspot and Customer.io across all Airbyte plans, with intentions to support approximately 200 additional application destinations. The Salesforce destination is available for customers on Airbyte Enterprise plans.

Performance and scalability

Airbyte has also enhanced its platform's performance speeds, claiming improvements by a factor of five to ten, which also extends to its supported connectors. This enables faster loading from multiple data sources, which can accelerate data-driven AI initiatives and allow organisations to move more quickly from development to production within their AI projects.

Airbyte Enterprise Flex offers organisations the option to deploy the platform quickly, reducing project rollouts from months to days. This expedites AI model training and analytics within the company's existing environments.

Integration and customisation

The platform provides access to Airbyte's comprehensive library of over 600 data connectors, which facilitate the movement of data between a variety of sources and destinations. Users also have access to an AI-assisted, no-code builder that allows for the rapid creation of custom connectors, ensuring specific business use-cases and data requirements can be addressed without extensive engineering resources.

Enterprises benefit from up-to-date, accurate, and complete data movement across their digital estates, with Airbyte handling operations including feature updates, logging, data governance, alerting, and lineage tracking. This functionality supports AI readiness, analysis, and data-driven decision making while maintaining data privacy and control.