An illustrative embodiment disclosed herein is an apparatus including a processor having programmed instructions to place a first compute resource in a storage node of an object storage platform and to place a second compute resource in a compute node in a client coupled to the object storage platform via a public network. In some embodiments, unstructured data is stored in the storage node. In some embodiments, the first compute resource of the storage node preprocesses the unstructured data. In some embodiments, the preprocessed unstructured data is sent to the compute node. In some embodiments, the second compute resource trains a machine learning (ML) model using the preprocessed unstructured data.