RAG quality and safety often rise and fall with connectors. A connector that silently skips ACLs, ingests stale content, or fails to detect changes can turn a well-designed assistant into an unreliable system. Connector hardening is the work of making ingestion trustworthy.
Start with provenance and source allowlists
Know where content comes from and why it is allowed:
- Source allowlists. Only ingest from approved systems and domains.
- Stable identifiers. Use deterministic IDs per document and version.
- Ownership. Every source needs a named owner and review cadence (see content review workflows).
Synchronise permissions as first-class data
Permissions are not optional metadata. They are a primary safety control:
- Capture ACLs and tenant boundaries at ingestion time.
- Apply filters at retrieval time, not just after ranking (see RAG permissions).
- Design cache keys to include entitlement context (see safe caching).
Detect changes reliably
Stale content is one of the most common RAG trust failures. Use change detection mechanisms that match the source:
- Event-driven. Webhooks or event streams for updates and deletes.
- Incremental scans. Timestamp or checksum scanning for systems without events.
- Tombstones. Explicit delete events that propagate through indexes and caches (see deletion workflows).
Quarantine risky content
Not all content should be indexed immediately. Quarantine:
- New sources without ownership.
- User-generated content or untrusted repositories.
- Content with missing classification or ambiguous permissions.
This reduces poisoning and low-quality ingestion (see data poisoning and data classification).
Make ingestion observable
Operators should see ingestion health: lag, failure rate, deletes processed, and freshness by domain. Treat freshness as an objective and alert when it degrades (see freshness architecture and alerting and runbooks).
Hardening connectors is not glamorous, but it is high leverage. Trust in RAG often depends more on ingestion discipline than on model choice.