Tenant-isolated indices.
Retrieval indices live in your tenancy alongside the data they index. Nothing is co-mingled with other clients, and nothing leaves.
Layer 03 — The ArchitectureLive
Data + Retrieval.
Tenant-isolated retrieval architecture — chunk-level access controls, citation-traceable answers, compliance-aware RAG.
Data + Retrieval is Layer 3 of the ism3 stack. Tenant-isolated retrieval architecture. Chunk-level access controls, citation-traceable answers, compliance-aware RAG.
Layer 3 is where most AI deployments begin and end — a vector index and a similarity search. ism3 treats retrieval as a governed data system instead: what gets indexed, who can retrieve which chunk, and how every answer traces back to its sources are design decisions with compliance consequences.
Access control operates at the chunk level, not the document level — the difference between an assistant that can quote from a record and one that leaks the parts a user was never cleared to see. Citation traceability runs the other direction: every generated answer carries provenance back to the exact passages that produced it.
The full architecture is published. The Layer 3 whitepaper documents the retrieval design, the isolation model, and the compliance posture in the iSimplifyMe reference architecture series.
Inside Layer 3.
Chunk-level access control.
Retrieval respects the permissions your records already carry — enforced at query time, per chunk, per user.
Citation traceability.
Answers cite the passages they came from. Provenance is a property of the pipeline, not a formatting choice.
Compliance-aware ingestion.
What enters the index is filtered and classified against your regulatory surface before a model ever sees it.
Reference architecture
The whitepaper is published.
Published in the iSimplifyMe reference architecture series — the canonical documentation of the Layer 3 design.
Layer 3: Data + Retrieval — Reference ArchitectureFAQ
Layer 3, answered.
Typical RAG implementations stop at similarity search over a shared index. Layer 3 is retrieval as governed infrastructure — tenant isolation, chunk-level permissions, and citation provenance — and it operates inside a stack that carries those guarantees from Layer 1 tenancy up to Layer 5 audit.
In your tenancy. Your client data, query logs, and retrieval indices never cross ism3’s environment.
Yes. The whitepaper is published on the iSimplifyMe research surface and linked from this page — it covers the retrieval design, the isolation model, and the compliance posture in full.