BYOK AI Infrastructure — Secure AI for Regulated Businesses

What is BYOK AI?

BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys) AI infrastructure means you control the encryption keys that protect your data, even when processed by AI models. Combined with EU-only data residency, this ensures:

• Your data never leaves EU jurisdiction
• You control encryption key lifecycle
• AI providers cannot access your plaintext data
• Compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, and sector regulations

Why standard AI doesn't work for regulated businesses

The data residency problem

Most AI services (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) process data in the US or undisclosed locations. For EU businesses, this creates GDPR compliance risks. For healthcare, it may violate data protection requirements.

The trust problem

When you send data to third-party AI APIs, you trust their security practices, their employees, and their sub-processors. With BYOK, you maintain cryptographic control.

The audit problem

Regulators and auditors ask: "Where is our data? Who has access?" Standard AI services make these questions hard to answer. BYOK infrastructure provides clear answers.

Architecture Overview

Core components

• EU-only compute: Infrastructure running exclusively in EU data centres (Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Dublin)
• Customer-managed keys: You control encryption keys via AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, or HashiCorp Vault
• Encrypted inference: Data is decrypted only in secure enclaves, processed, then re-encrypted
• Zero retention: No logging or training on your data

Data flow

1. Your application sends encrypted data to EU infrastructure
2. Data is decrypted within a secure execution environment
3. AI model processes data and generates response
4. Response is encrypted with your key
5. Encrypted response returned to your application
6. Decryption happens in your environment only

Use Cases

Healthcare — Clinical documentation

Automate clinical note generation while keeping patient data in EU-only infrastructure with customer-controlled keys. HIPAA-aligned audit logging included.

Legal — Contract analysis

Process sensitive client contracts through AI without exposing data to third-party training sets. Client confidentiality maintained.

Finance — Risk assessment

Analyse financial data and generate risk reports with full audit trails and regulatory-compliant data handling.

Hospitality — Personalised service

Use guest data for AI-powered personalisation while maintaining GDPR compliance and data sovereignty.

Implementation Options

Option 1: Fully managed

We deploy and manage BYOK AI infrastructure in your EU cloud account. You control the keys; we handle the operations.

• AWS, Azure, or GCP deployment
• EU regions only (Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Dublin)
• Your KMS keys, your control
• 99.9% uptime SLA
• Audit-ready documentation included

Option 2: Self-hosted guidance

We architect and hand over BYOK AI infrastructure for your team to operate. Full documentation and knowledge transfer included.

• Infrastructure-as-code templates
• Security hardening guides
• Operational runbooks
• Incident response playbooks

Option 3: Hybrid approach

Start managed, transition to self-hosted as your team builds capability. Phased handover with ongoing advisory.

Compliance Mapping

GDPR

• Article 44: Data transfers — EU-only processing
• Article 32: Security — Encryption with customer keys
• Article 5: Principles — Purpose limitation enforced
• Article 25: Privacy by design — Built in from start

HIPAA (US healthcare)

• Encryption at rest and in transit
• Access controls and audit logging
• Business Associate Agreement (BAA) support
• Risk assessment documentation

Sector-specific

• Financial services: FCA/PRA guidance alignment
• Healthcare: NHS Digital standards (UK)
• Legal: SRA Code of Conduct compliance

Technical Specifications

Infrastructure

• Compute: Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) in EU regions
• GPU: NVIDIA A10G or H100 instances for inference
• Storage: Encrypted S3/Azure Blob/GCS with customer keys
• Network: Private subnets, no public internet egress

AI Models

• Open-source models (Llama, Mistral, Falcon) — no API calls
• Self-hosted embeddings models
• Custom fine-tuning available
• No data retention or training on your inputs

Security

• AES-256 encryption at rest
• TLS 1.3 in transit
• Hardware Security Module (HSM) key storage
• Automatic key rotation
• Secure enclaves for inference (where available)

Costs and Timeline

Typical deployment

• Timeline: 4-6 weeks from kickoff to production
• Cost: Infrastructure from £800/month (compute dependent)
• Setup: One-time implementation fee

What affects cost

• Inference volume (tokens per month)
• Model size (7B, 13B, 70B parameters)
• Availability requirements (single/multi-region)
• Additional services (monitoring, backup, DR)

FAQ

Can you use OpenAI/Anthropic APIs with BYOK?

No. Third-party APIs require sending data to their servers. BYOK requires self-hosted models. We use open-source models (Llama, Mistral) that match GPT-4 quality for most business use cases.

What if we need models larger than 70B parameters?

We support 70B+ parameter models through multi-GPU configurations. For very large models (175B+), we can architect distributed inference or recommend phased approaches.

How do we handle model updates?

Models are containerised and deployed via CI/CD. Updates are tested in staging before production deployment. Blue-green deployments minimise downtime.

What happens if we lose our encryption keys?

We recommend HSM-backed keys with organisational recovery procedures. Keys can be escrowed with your legal/security team. Without keys, data is cryptographically unrecoverable — this is the security guarantee.