Panzura’s Nexus product delivers unstructured Panzura metadata and user permissions to Azure’s Copilot in Microsoft Graph format, enabling user’s conversational AI access to their Panzura files.
CloudFS is Panzura’s filesystem, built on an object storage base, and it provides collaborative, real-time data access by distributed global users. The product has a global namespace and metadata store plus distributed file locking and Cloud Mirroring. Panzura acquired Moonwalk Universal in mid-2024 and its Enterprise Data Management software which monitors a customer’s multi-vendor unstructured (file and object) data on-premises and in the public cloud. At that time, Panzure said Moonwalk’s technology would have a role in preparing data infrastructure for AI-driven insights and innovation, and helping customers harness the value of AI in their own environments. So it has come to pass as this technology is the basis for the Nexus offering.
Karthik Ramamurthy.
Karthik Ramamurthy, Panzura’s CEO, said: “Panzura Nexus is architected as an AI‑integrated platform for enterprise file data. With this initial release, we’re securely connecting CloudFS to Copilot through Panzura Nexus’s event‑driven ingestion pipeline. This marks a pivotal moment in our journey to help customers unlock AI‑powered intelligence from their file data, without compromising security, permissions, or trust.”
Nexus users can, via Microsoft 365 Copilot, ask natural-language questions, discover content and context across millions of files, and extract actionable insights, while maintaining the same security and access controls that govern their file environment.
Nexus is event-driven and, when a file is added, deleted or has a status change, that metadata is processed and passed to Copilot through a Microsoft Graph connector. This enables Copilot Large Language Models (LLMs) to interrogate the CloudFS data as if it were inside the Microsoft 365 environment, without having to set up extract, transfer and load (ETL) pipelines. CloudFS user permissions status is also exported up to Copilot so that an LLM user can only access files to which they have access rights.
The connector captures file content, metadata, and ACL changes, renames, and directory structure changes as discrete events as they occur, keeping Copilot continuously synchronized with the live CloudFS file system.
Customer administrators define ingestion policies, and Panzura Nexus applies them, with no need to configure middleware or set up an intervening data lake. It ensures real‑time, event-driven permission enforcement to enable AI access reflects current file system policies.
Mike Harvey.
Mike Harvey, SVP of Products at Panzura, said: “Most approaches for connecting file data to AI either ignore permissions or force organizations to rebuild their access controls from scratch. Panzura Nexus preserves the permissions that already exist in the file system and enforces them inside Copilot in near real-time. If you don’t have access to a file, you won’t have access to its content or meaning through Copilot—an essential requirement for any enterprise serious about data governance.”
A screen dashboard provides visibility into ingestion activity, including upload rate, total object counts and sizes, and filtering by policy, file extension, user, and time range.
For customers running Panzura CloudFS on Microsoft Azure, Nexus creates an end-to-end Microsoft-native AI data pipeline with no third-party AI infrastructure required.
In the future, agents produced with Copilot Studio will have the same, permission-limited, ability to look into CloudFS files for their reasoning work. Nexus-ingested data will be immediately available as a knowledge source for custom agents built in Copilot Studio, declarative agents deployed through the Microsoft 365 Agent Store, and agentic AI workflows.
Panzura Nexus will be extended to other vendor’s file systems outside Panzura’s own CloudFS, enabling the same real-time change capture, permission synchronization, and trusted data pipeline for Copilot.
Nexus is now generally available. Find out more here. Panzura is a Microsoft co-sell partner with products available through the Microsoft commercial marketplace.