Introducing Lightning IQ: Making Petabyte‑Scale Data Scanning a Reality

Innovative software platform delivers real‑time data clarity for legal, IT, security, and AI teams - at true petabyte scale.

For years, enterprises have been trapped in a cycle of data growth without data understanding. Storage expands. Cloud buckets multiply. Archives accumulate. Yet visibility into what’s inside all that unstructured content has barely improved.

Across Legal, IT, Security, Privacy, and Governance teams, the questions have stayed the same:

• What is in our data?
• How quickly can we find answers when a breach occurs or litigation lands?
• Where is our sensitive information buried?
• How much ROT - redundant, obsolete, trivial content - is inflating our storage costs?
• Which data is safe and usable for AI?
• What data can I defensibly delete or move to lower cost archives?
• Do I need this back-up of a back-up of a back-up?

Traditional scanning and indexing tools simply weren’t built to meet modern scale. They choke on billions of objects. They take weeks or months to produce results … if they can produce results at all. They require heavy infrastructure, endless configuration, and - worst of all - moving or copying enormous volumes of data just to look at it.

Today, that era ends.

I’m proud to introduce Lightning IQ - a platform engineered to deliver the world’s fastest, most scalable data‑in‑place intelligence. Designed for today’s petabyte‑scale reality, Lightning IQ brings unprecedented visibility, speed, and simplicity to one of the hardest problems in the enterprise.

Why Lightning IQ Exists: A Category‑Defining Vision

Unstructured data has become the largest, fastest‑growing, and most chaotic segment of the corporate digital footprint. It's where risk hides, where costs balloon, and where it is now impossible to separate the mission-critical information from the noise.

For decades, organizations tried to solve this with legacy scanners, brittle connectors, and indexing engines that pre‑date cloud computing. They are slow. They are unreliable. And they don’t scale. They were never meant to operate at petabyte scale, nor were they designed for the complexity and depth of modern folder structures.

The result? Organizations tack on 30% more storage capacity each renewal period - at $1M per petabyte – kicking the can down the road in hopes that a new approach to data scanning will emerge.

Lightning IQ Is the new approach.

• Scan everything.
• Move nothing.
• Deliver answers in hours, not weeks.

The result is a new category: Petabyte‑Scale Data Intelligence.

Built for Today’s Scale: Petabytes per Hour, Billions of Objects per Day

Lightning IQ scans and processes data at a scale that neither legacy tools, nor ad-hoc workflows can approach - and this performance is not theoretical. It is battle tested, proven, and running in production today – solving real-world problems at petabyte-scale.
In real customer environments, Lightning IQ has:
•    Delivered petabytes per hour scanning speeds across hybrid infrastructure.
•    Processed tens of billions of objects per day - without indexing bottlenecks.
•    Maintained full visibility across petabytes of unstructured data - and 90 billion files - on a continuous daily cadence.

This isn’t hyperbole or lab grade benchmarking. These results come from live, global deployments where legacy tools previously needed six to nine weeks and still failed to complete a single pass.

Lightning IQ represents more than incremental improvement - it's a complete reimagining of how enterprise data intelligence should work. Whether your environment spans Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, NFS/SMB shares, or a fully hybrid mix, Lightning IQ delivers the same outcome every time: rapid, reliable, real-time visibility at true petabyte scale, without operational disruption.

Data‑In‑Place Discovery: The Core Innovation

Where legacy tools force you to extract, crawl, or re‑index data, Lightning IQ reverses the model. We go to where the data already lives. With a distributed, event‑driven, asynchronous architecture, Lightning IQ:

• Deploys in minutes via fully automated, infrastructure‑as‑code installation.
• Requires no heavy indexing infrastructure - no Elasticsearch clusters, no new storage layers, no lift‑and‑shift migrations.
• Scales horizontally and vertically to meet the performance of any environment.

This “data‑in‑place” approach eliminates the single biggest blocker enterprises have faced: the cost, complexity, and risk of moving massive datasets before you can understand them.

What Lightning IQ Delivers: Discovery, Classification, Mapping, Analytics

Lightning IQ’s platform transforms raw, chaotic, unstructured data into clean, actionable intelligence through four core capability pillars:

• Discovery: Instant visibility into what exists across all repositories, including ROT, dark data, duplicate clusters, and high‑risk files.
• Classification: Automated detection of PII, PHI, IP, confidential material, and compliance‑sensitive data (HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, and more).
• Mapping: Enterprise‑wide data maps illustrating where content lives, where it moves, who has access, and what information poses risk.
• Analytics: Executive‑grade dashboards for CIOs, CISOs, CLOs, CPOs, and GRC teams - surfacing insights that drive immediate, measurable action.

Lightning IQ doesn’t just accelerate analysis and decision making - it radically reduces risk.

Powering the Most Critical Enterprise Use Cases

Lightning IQ supports the initiatives that matter most to modern enterprises, including:

• Data Remediation - clean ROT, reduce attack surface, eliminate legacy exposure
• Cloud Migration - reduce data footprint before moving to the cloud
• Breach Response - instantly identify exposed data after a compromise
• AI Readiness - identify risks before they become liabilities in model training
• Governance & Compliance - enforce retention, access, and regulatory policies
• Legal & eDiscovery - evaluate data in place, perform ECA, send only relevant data to AI for review.

Each of these use cases requires speed. Each requires scale. And each requires confidence that the insights are accurate, timely, and defensible.

Lightning IQ was built for exactly this.

The Future of Enterprise Data Starts Here

Lightning IQ represents a leap forward - an opportunity to finally break the cycle of data chaos and replace it with clarity, control, and confident action. Whether you’re managing data centers, leading breach response, preparing for AI, responding to litigation, or migrating to the cloud, Lightning IQ gives you the insight you need at the speed the modern enterprise demands.

The era of waiting days or weeks for data answers is over.

Lightning IQ makes petabyte‑scale intelligence a reality - today.

Like to see Lightning IQ in action?  Book a 30‑minute demo with me!

See how Lightning IQ can deliver petabyte‑scale visibility in hours. We’ll walk you through real customer architectures, performance benchmarks, and use cases tailored to your environment.