BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)

Standard SaaS runs entirely on the vendor's infrastructure — simplest for the customer, but it means trusting the vendor's cloud environment, its access controls, and its data-handling practices without direct visibility or control. For some organizations — sovereignty-sensitive customers, regulated industries, or anyone with a "customer data never leaves our own cloud boundary" requirement — that trust model doesn't clear procurement.

BYOC is a middle position between full SaaS and full self-hosting: the vendor's software is deployed into the customer's own cloud account, inside infrastructure the customer owns and can audit, but the vendor typically still manages the deployment, updates, and operational burden — the customer gets sovereignty over the environment without taking on all the operational work self-hosting implies.

It's most relevant to organizations with a specific sovereignty or compliance requirement that a shared multi-tenant SaaS environment can't satisfy, but who also don't have the operational capacity (or desire) to run and maintain the software entirely themselves the way a fully self-hosted deployment would require.