Bring your own cloud (BYOC)

Bring your own cloud (BYOC) is a deployment model in which vendor software runs inside the customer's own cloud account, often managed remotely by the vendor.

Part of the Learn hub and the customer data glossary.

What it means in practice

BYOC splits a product in two. The control plane, which handles orchestration, upgrades and monitoring, is run by the vendor. The data plane, which stores and processes your data, runs in a cloud account that you own. The vendor typically reaches into that account through a cross-account role to deploy and manage it.

What stays with you: the data's location, the cloud-native controls you already use such as network rules, key management and logging, and the cloud bill for compute and storage. What the vendor adds is day-to-day operation without you running the software. The vendor's fee is separate.

BYOC is vendor shorthand rather than a standard, and offers differ. Ask what permissions the vendor's role holds in your account, whether telemetry includes customer data, how you revoke access quickly, who patches, and whether the data plane keeps working if the control plane is unavailable.

BYOC is not self-hosting, where you operate the software. It also does not remove contractual duties: if vendor personnel can reach personal data they are processing it, so a data processing agreement is needed, and a business associate agreement if protected health information is involved.

Example (health insurer): a payer deploys a vendor's data plane in its own AWS account with keys in its own key management service. The vendor manages upgrades remotely, and the payer can cut the vendor's access role if the relationship ends.

Related terms

• Self-hosted customer data platform (CDP): customer-operated.
• Single-tenant vs multi-tenant: isolation model.
• Customer-managed keys: keys stay yours.
• Data residency: data stays in your region.
• Data egress: what leaves the account.

Where it matters

• Customer data platform on AWS, Azure and GCP: reference architectures.
• On-premise, private cloud and self-hosted customer data platforms: the complete guide: BYOC among the options.