Introduction
IBM has recently introduced Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployment models for Db2, Db2 Warehouse, and Netezza enabling customers to benefit from a SaaS-like operational experience while allowing you to run your data processing directly on your own infrastructure.
This approach empowers you to maintain full control over your data sovereignty while your data remains within your cloud account and network, governed by your policies. With BYOC, IBM handles the operational complexity and mundane tasks of running a database environment, while you retain ownership and oversight of your data.
Why is this important and what are the benefits
The benefits of this model of delivery are in addition to the benefits you get from a fully managed service like:
- automating provisioning
- easily scaling up and down your environments
- automatic maintenance and patching
- monitoring and addressing any issues that occur.
Instead, they give you more control over your data:
1. Regulatory Compliance is easier
- Improve Posture: Ensures compliance with local data protection laws.
- Audit readiness: Easier to demonstrate compliance during deep audits and legal reviews.
2. Enhanced Data Security
- Localized control: Reduces exposure to surveillance or duplication of data.
- Custom security policies: Enable account security controls and monitor to your own standards.
3. Performance Optimization
- Reduced latency: Keeping data close to your applications improves access speed and your applications responsiveness as a result.
- Edge accessibility: Enables more efficient processing at or near the data source as you are connecting to your data source without egressing your account.
4. Business Continuity and Risk Management
- More Transparency: You have more visibility into your data’s recoverability.
- Disaster recovery: Easier to implement region-specific backup and recovery strategies.
5. Trust and Market Advantage
- Transparency: Enhanced clarity about where and how your data is stored.
- Market access: Some regions require local data storage to do business. These offerings as they expand will offer significantly broader regional availability.
6. Strategic Autonomy
- Policy control: more control over data lifecycle, retention, and deletion policies.
- Leverage your own tools: Leverage your own security tools and process to monitor the environment so that it fits into your data security model (EDR, SIEM etc)
How Do These Offerings Enable BYOC
IBM deploys a Managed Control Plane within each supported cloud provider (e.g., Azure, AWS) and some cases in different regions. This control plane orchestrates the provisioning of infrastructure—such as Kubernetes clusters, storage, and supporting services—directly in your cloud account.
Key Operational Details:
- Provisioning: You deploy reviewable templates (e.g., Azure Resource Manager or AWS CloudFormation) that define the infrastructure boundaries and restrict IBM’s access to only what’s necessary.
- Access Control:
- On Azure, IBM uses Managed Identities and Azure Lighthouse.
- On AWS, Boundary Policies enforce access limits.
- Operational Model: IBM interacts with your environment via a message queue, sending control messages to trigger actions like patching, rebuilds, restarts or VM replacements. Direct access is only used in rare, critical scenarios and is always bounded by the permissions defined in the deployment templates.
- Monitoring: IBM monitors your environment for issues by sending metrics back to IBM where we monitor, alert and act on any issues that may appear.
Final Thoughts
The Bring Your Own Cloud model is ideal for organizations that need the benefits of a managed database service but also require strict control over data location, access, and compliance. While some may prefer traditional SaaS for its simplicity, BYOC offers a compelling alternative for those prioritizing data sovereignty, security, and operational transparency.
Credits: Andrew Hilden (ahilden@ca.ibm.com), Venkatesh Gopal (gopalv@us.ibm.com), Brajesh Pandy (bkpandey@us.ibm.com), Satya Krishnaswamy (satya.ksr@us.ibm.com)