What is Bring Your Own Cloud?

In a BYOC model, customers leverage their existing cloud infrastructure to run applications provided by the vendor, keeping their data within their cloud accounts and some control flexibilities over their cloud infrastructure. As a tradeoff, customers have to assume partial infrastructure, security, and support responsibilities, shared with the vendor and cloud service providers.

SaaS, on the other hand, provides a serverless offering that is fully managed by the provider, eliminating the need for customers to handle infrastructure or maintenance. Security and operational burdens are fully managed by the vendor, while the user typically has options to add additional security policies and controls on encryption of sensitive data, access controls, authentication, edge protection, and more. This is becoming the de facto standard for most cloud services, whereas many vendors offering BYOC deployments eventually pivot to a SaaS offering.

A third alternative is a self-managed solution, which involves customers installing and managing the software on their own hardware or cloud infrastructure. This requires in-house resources for setup, maintenance, and updates but with clear costs and responsibilities and full control over their data environment.

The reason to choose a BYOC deployment is not because it is inherently more secure, but because of a companies preference on data sovereignty within their cloud environments. When it comes to data sovereignty and control, BYOC might initially seem advantageous because the data resides within the user's account but the reality is data still resides in a multi-tenant cloud environment, just as it would in a SaaS offering. The ability to revoke vendor access to data is not unique to BYOC setups but also exists in SaaS models through mechanisms like customer-controlled encryption at rest.

The security of both BYOC and SaaS models relies on a balanced approach, including just-in-time access and detailed logging. With a BYOC configuration, the responsibility to secure the environment falls squarely on the customer. This includes controlling access to other systems and services and investing in proper security scanning and monitoring oversight.

There are also various degrees of security scrutiny in BYOC design. Most typical BYOC deployment models for data streaming require providing the vendor with expansive access and IAM roles to access your environment and data to manage your clusters and mitigate issues. In contrast, Confluent WarpStream is designed with zero access by default by separating data from metadata, so none of these excessive permissions are required to keep your clusters up and running.

Seamlessly connect your data and apps everywhere they reside, across hybrid and multicloud architectures.

Confluent offers true deployment flexibility to support hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Confluent exists everywhere your applications and data reside, providing you the freedom to leverage a fully managed service on all leading public clouds, a zero access BYOC service for compliance-sensitive workloads, and self-managed software for on-premises workloads, whether on bare metal, VMs, or Kubernetes. Best of all, you can seamlessly connect it all in real time with Cluster Linking, creating a consistent data layer across your entire business.