Pure Storage has enhanced its platform to address two priorities that dominate enterprise agendas this year: resilient defenses against fast-evolving threats and simpler access to data for AI across hybrid IT environments. With updates and partner tie-ins, the company is pushing storage to perform less like isolated appliances and more like a coordinated data layer that spans datacenter and public cloud.
A centerpiece of the roadmap is an expanded intelligent control plane, the unified layer Pure Storage uses to automate provisioning, protection, and governance across the data estate. The control plane now hooks into Model Context Protocol (MCP), an AI-native interface designed to let systems exchange context using natural language. For IT teams, that means the storage system can communicate with external platforms such as VMware to plan migrations or troubleshoot configurations without deep scripting, bringing explainability and speed to routine operations.
Prakash Darji, General Manager, Digital Experience Unit at Pure Storage, noted that many moving parts had to be coordinated for this release. “There were a lot of challenges for us to get to this point, and most of them were in security,” he told TechStrong.it. “MCP doesn’t have a really good role-based access controls or authorization model. So we had to build our own.”
Easing Migration
Pure Storage is extending its Enterprise Data Cloud into hyperscale environments with Pure Storage Cloud, a move intended to keep datasets reachable by AI tools regardless of location. The company’s Intelligent Control Plane allows admins to automate how data is governed across a distributed environment. One early flagship is Pure Storage Cloud Azure Native for Azure VMware Solution, a fully managed service in the Azure portal that lets customers move storage-heavy VMware estates without refactoring and decouple storage from compute to control costs.
“If you wanted to migrate from VMware to some other hypervisor, given the amount of configuration, storage, compute, networking, et cetera involved, it would be a huge undertaking,” Darji said. “And that has gotten significantly simpler with things that are now available with our Intelligent Control Plane.” Indeed, Darji’s demonstration of the solution’s interface showed a migration scenario that was remarkably clear and straight forward, and used natural language.
Threat Detection
Rather than treating storage as a passive vault, Pure Storage is configuring the platform into an extended threat-detection network so data-layer signals can inform, and be informed by, security tooling. A collaboration with CrowdStrike streams array telemetry into Falcon Next-Gen SIEM to enable real-time policy updates, isolation, and protected replication when indicators of compromise appear. An integration with Superna adds file and user behavior monitoring to flag data exfiltration and ransomware, with automatic account lockdowns when suspicious activity is detected.
The strategy reflects a practical read on where AI projects fail: not in model quality, but in moving, governing, and safeguarding data fast enough to keep pace with development. By centralizing control and spreading security context across partners, Pure Storage is aiming to turn storage into a policy-driven substrate for hybrid AI.
In sum, Pure Storage is developing a single, cloud-present control fabric—tied into security ecosystems and geared for AI data interface—that will give enterprises faster paths from data to inference, even when the environment spans multiple clouds and legacy environments.
