What is Bring Your Own Cloud for search?
The Linkup Team
Bring Your Own Cloud keeps search queries inside your VPC, the only architecture where data never reaches the vendor at all.
What Bring Your Own Cloud means for a fast enterprise search engine
Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deploys the search index and infrastructure inside the customer's own cloud account. Queries are processed within the customer VPC and never transit to the vendor's servers. This is the distinguishing property: in a BYOC deployment, the search provider has no access path to the query payload or the documents being searched.
Most enterprise search solutions run as multi-tenant SaaS. Your queries hit the vendor's endpoint, get processed on the vendor's infrastructure, and return a response. BYOC inverts that. The control plane stays with the vendor; the data plane runs on your hardware. Linkup is the only web search API offering full BYOC, with both index and infrastructure deployed inside the customer VPC.
BYOC vs Zero Data Retention: they solve different problems
Zero Data Retention (ZDR) and BYOC are often confused. They are not the same control.
- Zero Data Retention means the vendor processes your query but does not store it. The data still leaves your environment, reaches the vendor's servers, gets processed in memory, and is discarded. Linkup runs ZDR by default.
- Bring Your Own Cloud means the query never leaves your environment in the first place. There is nothing to retain because the vendor never receives it.
The difference matters when your threat model includes the vendor itself, or when a regulator requires that regulated data physically stay within a defined boundary. ZDR is a policy. BYOC is an architecture. A policy can be misconfigured or breached. An architecture where data never transits cannot leak data it never holds.
When BYOC is required, not optional
BYOC becomes a hard requirement in specific regulated and high-sensitivity contexts. If any of these apply, ZDR alone will not pass a compliance review:
- Data residency mandates. Regulations that require regulated data to remain inside a specific jurisdiction or inside the organization's own infrastructure.
- Air-gapped or restricted network environments. Defense, critical infrastructure, and some financial settings prohibit outbound calls to third-party endpoints.
- Contractual data-handling clauses. Enterprise procurement that forbids any third party from processing customer or client data, even transiently.
- Sensitive query content. When the search query itself reveals confidential information (a legal matter, a pending acquisition, patient data), the query is the secret, not just the result.
A financial services team building an AI research assistant on confidential deal data is a typical case: the query string alone is material non-public information.
What you keep when search runs inside your VPC
Running a SaaS enterprise search platform inside your own cloud gives you the accuracy of a managed service without the data exposure. With Linkup BYOC you retain the same performance characteristics as the hosted API:
- 92% F-score on Verified SimpleQA from the /search API, #1 among sub-second web search APIs.
- 61% accuracy on SealQA-0 from the /research endpoint, #1 across the board.
- SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance.
- Customer-defined index, so the search corpus matches your domain.
Latency stays sub-second because the index sits next to your application rather than across a public network hop. You get the best enterprise AI search provider capabilities with the data boundary your security team requires.
How BYOC fits an existing stack
BYOC does not change how your engineers call the API. Linkup integrates through the OpenAI SDK, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, the Vercel AI SDK, n8n, and an MCP server. The integration code is identical to the hosted version. The difference is where the endpoint lives: a BYOC deployment points your application at an in-VPC endpoint instead of Linkup's public one. Your security and infrastructure teams own the deployment; Linkup provides the index and runtime.
If your AI product has to clear a procurement security review or a data residency audit, start with the BYOC option. Talk to the team at contact@linkup.so to scope a deployment.
FAQ
What is Bring Your Own Cloud for search?
Bring Your Own Cloud deploys the search index and infrastructure inside the customer's own cloud VPC, so queries are processed locally and never reach the vendor's servers.
How is BYOC different from Zero Data Retention?
Zero Data Retention means the vendor processes but does not store your query. BYOC means the query never leaves your environment, so there is nothing for the vendor to receive or retain.
Does BYOC slow down enterprise search?
No. Because the index sits next to your application inside your VPC, Linkup BYOC keeps sub-second latency without a public network round trip.
Which enterprise search providers offer full BYOC?
Linkup is the only web search API that offers full BYOC, deploying both the index and the infrastructure inside the customer VPC.
When do I actually need BYOC instead of a standard SaaS enterprise search platform?
BYOC is required when data residency rules, air-gapped networks, contractual data-handling clauses, or sensitive query content prohibit any third party from processing your data.
Does BYOC change my integration code?
No. The API call is identical to the hosted version; you point your application at an in-VPC endpoint instead of Linkup's public one.
