Thales is partnering with Google Cloud to add generative AI features to its CipherTrust Data Security Platform, the company said this week. The first project will be to build a data discovery and classification tool based on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI machine learning platform.

Gartner estimates that companies will deploy more than 95% of new digital workloads on cloud-native platforms by 2025, up dramatically from 30% in 2021. But all that cloud reliance comes with new or enhanced security threats, such as not knowing where sensitive data is being stored.

Thales will build a data discovery and classification machine learning feature using Vertex AI to help organizations find and categorize data, and then applying the correct controls to protect the data. The new capabilities, which will be part of CipherTrust Platform’s Intelligence Protection service, will use machine learning to classify data into categories and subcategories, Thales said. Semantic context will help discover and classify information from a range of document repositories while ensuring sensitive data remains within defined boundaries. By using named entity recognition techniques, the service will be able to discover a range of sensitive information types.

Google Cloud’s Vertex AI will allow Thales to automate processes and perform tasks in line with corporate policies.