Most observability and SIEM vendors run on a simple deal: you send them your telemetry, they store and index it in their cloud, and you rent access to your own data back. For regulated industries, security-conscious teams, and anyone with a data-sovereignty requirement, that model is a non-starter. BYOC observability, short for bring your own cloud, flips it around: the platform runs inside your environment, and your telemetry never leaves it. This post explains what BYOC observability is, why data sovereignty matters, and how to keep every byte of telemetry in your own cloud.
What “bring your own cloud” observability means
In a BYOC deployment, the collection, compression, storage, and query layers all run in accounts you control: your AWS, Azure, or GCP project, your Kubernetes clusters, or your on-prem data center. The vendor provides the software; you provide the environment. The practical consequence is the one that matters most for security and compliance: your telemetry data stays with you. It is stored in your buckets, under your encryption keys, inside your network perimeter.
That is the design at Sasquatch Labs: super-compressed signals, stored in your own cloud. Nothing goes out to us. Not the logs, not the traces, not the metrics, and not even the query results. There is no copy of your data in our account because there is no path for it to get there.
Why data sovereignty is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have
- Regulatory data residency. Frameworks and regional laws increasingly require that certain data stay within a jurisdiction or within the organization’s control. Shipping telemetry to a third-party cloud can put you offside.
- Sensitive data in telemetry. Logs and traces leak PII, PHI, secrets, and internal topology whether you intend them to or not. Keeping them in-house shrinks the blast radius of any exposure.
- Vendor breach exposure. If your telemetry lives in a vendor’s platform, their breach is your breach. BYOC removes that shared fate.
- Contractual and audit control. When the data never leaves, proving access control and residency to an auditor is straightforward.
The safest place for sensitive telemetry is the environment that already holds your other sensitive data: your own cloud, under your own keys.
“Nothing goes out” is an architecture, not a promise
Plenty of vendors will tell you they treat your data carefully. BYOC makes that structural rather than aspirational. When the platform is deployed in your cloud, the guarantee is enforced by network reality: the data physically stays put. Here is what that looks like end to end:
- Collection stays local. Agents compress telemetry losslessly at the edge, inside your environment.
- Storage stays local. Compressed data lands in your object storage, encrypted with your keys.
- Query stays local. Snowman, our query engine, runs against your storage in place and speaks LogQL, SPL, TraceQL, and PromQL, so engineers query full-fidelity data without any of it being exported.
- Security analytics stay local. The Yeti SIEM layer runs detections and correlation on the same in-cloud data, so security operations never require shipping logs to an external analytics platform.
BYOC also removes the egress tax
Keeping telemetry in your cloud is not only safer, it is cheaper. Data that never leaves your environment never crosses the egress boundary, so the recurring transfer fees that come with shipping telemetry to a SaaS vendor simply do not exist. Combined with lossless compression that shrinks storage by an order of magnitude or more, BYOC turns observability from a spiraling operating expense into a predictable one. We break the numbers down in the hidden cost of observability data egress.
Own your telemetry
If your observability or SIEM strategy depends on trusting a third party with your most sensitive operational data, you have taken on a cost and a risk you do not need to. BYOC observability keeps every byte in your own cloud, satisfies data-sovereignty and compliance requirements by construction, and eliminates egress along the way. See how it works at sasquatchlabs.io, or read on about the security and compliance risk of third-party telemetry.