Data Sovereignty for AI
Your AI is sending regulated data loutside its approved region.
Every prompt you send to a cloud LLM carries your data to wherever that vendor's servers are. If your regulations say the data stays inside your region, every AI call is a potential breach. Protecto masks sensitive values before they cross any boundary, so the LLM works without ever seeing the raw data.
- SOC 2 Certified
- GDPR & HIPAA Ready
- Live in <15 minutes
- Trusted by Engineering Teams Building AI at Scale
The Problem
Your AI is moving regulated data across boundaries. You may not know it is happening.
Teams focus on what the AI says. The data residency problem lives in where the data goes: which cloud, which region, which API call sends raw customer records outside your approved boundary.
Your cloud AI vendor processes data where their servers sit, not where your regulations say the data must stay
The moment a prompt containing customer data reaches a US-hosted LLM, your data residency obligation is broken. You have no audit trail showing what crossed the border, and no way to prove compliance when a regulator asks.
Switching to a local LLM means rebuilding your stack. Local models still don't match GPT-4 accuracy
Your team built on OpenAI or Azure. Moving to an on-premises model means rewriting integrations, retraining workflows, and accepting worse answers. The compliance problem is real, but the tradeoff is too expensive to accept.
GDPR Article 44 restricts cross-border transfers. Every AI prompt is a potential violation you have no record of
Data protection law requires documented safeguards for every transfer of personal data outside the EEA. Without a per-call log of what was sent and what was masked, you cannot produce the evidence an audit demands.
How it works
Add one line of code. Protecto handles the rest.
Protecto sits between your AI and your data. Nothing changes in how you built your app.
Detect
Before any data leaves your environment, Protecto scans it. It finds regulated PII: account numbers, names, IDs, and addresses across structured records, documents, and free-form text, in over 28 languages including Arabic.
Transform
Sensitive values are replaced with safe tokens before the prompt is sent. The cloud LLM reads <IBAN>...</IBAN> and still reasons correctly. The original data never crosses the boundary.
Govern
Every call is logged: what data was found, what was masked, which boundary it would have crossed, and when. Your DPO gets a per-call record that maps directly to GDPR Article 44 documentation requirements.
See how to use cloud AI while keeping regulated data inside your region.
Capabilities
Three ways Protecto keeps regulated data inside its boundary.
Protecto intercepts data before it moves, replaces raw values with safe tokens, and stores the originals where you control access.
Keep raw data inside your approved boundary, every time
Cloud LLMs run on servers in another country. The moment a prompt carrying customer data reaches them, your data residency obligation breaks. Protecto intercepts the data before it leaves your environment and replaces every regulated value with a safe token. The cloud LLM gets the context it needs to answer. The raw data never moves.
- Scans every data path: documents, prompts, tool outputs, and agent context, before anything leaves your region
- Supports 28 languages and non-Latin scripts, including Arabic numerals and mixed-language financial records
- Logs every interception with entity type, source field, and timestamp, ready for GDPR Article 44 documentation
Use any cloud LLM without exposing raw sensitive data
You do not have to choose between cloud AI capability and data residency compliance. Protecto sits between your data and the LLM. Sensitive values are replaced before the prompt leaves your region. The AI reads <IBAN>...</IBAN> and still reasons correctly: account summaries, risk scoring, and customer support queries all work. The real data never moves.
- Context-preserving tokens keep the sentence structure intact so the LLM still understands what it is reading
- Consistent mapping: the same customer's IBAN always becomes [IBAN_001] across all calls in a session
- Less than 1% change in LLM response accuracy, benchmarked across GPT-4 and Claude standard financial QA tasks
Store original values where only you control access
Protecto stores the original sensitive values in a vault inside your approved environment. The cloud LLM never holds them. When an authorized system needs the real data to complete a transaction, generate a report, or feed a downstream process, it retrieves it through a controlled API. Your data residency boundary never breaks, and every retrieval is logged.
- Original values stay inside your region, in a vault you control, not on a third-party server
- Policy-controlled de-tokenisation: only systems with explicit permission can retrieve original values for specific entity types
- Every vault access is logged with the requesting system, entity type, and timestamp for full audit coverage
Customer story
How a top-tier Middle Eastern bank adopted GPT-4o without sending customer data outside its borders
Challenge: A leading financial institution needed to use GPT-4o for financial summarization and customer support in Arabic and English. Strict data residency laws blocked any transfer of customer records to US-based LLM servers.
GPT-4o in production — 99% recall on sensitive data, zero records sent outside the approved region
“We evaluated two other solutions before Protecto. Neither handled Arabic script reliably, and neither gave us the audit log our compliance team needed. Protecto got the detection right in week one and the compliance report was ready by week two.”
— Head of AI Infrastructure, Top-Tier Middle Eastern Financial Institution
99%
Recall on sensitive data including Arabic numerals
96%
Precision rate, minimal over-masking
4 weeks
Time to full production deployment
Integrations
Works where your data lives
One line of code. Drop it into what you already built. Nothing else changes.
Common Questions
Questions from security and compliance teams
Where exactly in an AI workflow can regulated data cross a regional boundary?
Data can cross a boundary at any point where it reaches a cloud service: the prompt sent to the LLM, documents retrieved by RAG and passed along, outputs from tools or APIs called by agents, and the final response generated by the model. Protecto intercepts each of these paths before data leaves your approved environment.
Does masking affect what the LLM can do with the data?
No. Protecto replaces sensitive values with context-preserving tokens. The LLM reads <IBAN>…</IBAN> instead of the real account number and still understands what the text describes. Benchmarks across GPT-4 and Claude show less than 1% change in response accuracy on standard financial question-answering tasks.
How long does it take to get started?
Most teams are live in under 15 minutes. Protecto integrates via a single API call or SDK wrapper added to your existing pipeline. No infrastructure changes, no model fine-tuning, and no rebuilding your app.
Which privacy and residency laws does Protecto help with?
Protecto maps to GDPR Article 44 for cross-border transfer restrictions, GDPR Article 25 for data protection by design, DPDP Section 16 for India data localisation requirements, and HIPAA §164.312. Every masking event is logged with entity type, source, and timestamp and is exportable for regulatory review.
Does Protecto work with cloud LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude?
Yes. Protecto works with OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, and all major LLM frameworks including LangChain and LlamaIndex. You add one function call to your existing code. Nothing else in your setup changes.
Can authorized systems still access the original data after it has been masked?
Yes. The original values are stored in a vault inside your approved environment. Systems with explicit policy permission can retrieve them via a controlled de-tokenisation API. The LLM never holds the real data, and every vault access is logged with the requesting system and timestamp.
Data Sovereignty for AI
Use cloud AI on regulated data. The data stays where it must.
30 minutes. We'll show you exactly how Protecto keeps your data inside its approved boundary while your AI keeps working.
- SOC2 Certified
- HIPAA Compliant
- GDPR Ready
- ISO 27001