Why BYOC Is the Future of Observability- for Everyone

When people hear BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud), it often sounds like an enterprise feature built for mega-corporations with strict compliance needs. But in observability, BYOC is quickly becoming the most practical, and often the only sustainable, model. Not just for Fortune 500s, but for every engineering team navigating the realities of scale, cost, and data ownership.

As the volume, complexity, and sensitivity of telemetry data grow, traditional SaaS observability models are starting to break. BYOC presents a new approach that brings control, cost-efficiency, and compliance back into the hands of engineering teams, without giving up the convenience of a managed service.

What is BYOC, and why does it matter?

In the world of observability, BYOC means deploying a vendor’s backend infrastructure inside your own cloud - your VPC, under your control, while the vendor manages it remotely. It's a fully managed observability platform that lives inside your infrastructure instead of theirs.

This model directly addresses the pain points modern teams are grappling with. First, rising telemetry costs: SaaS platforms commonly use ingestion-based pricing, which scales aggressively (and often unpredictably) as your data grows, something microservices and always-on pipelines only accelerate.

Second, there’s compliance. With regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI becoming standard, many companies simply can't afford to send sensitive telemetry data outside their controlled environments.

Finally, there’s the operational burden. Instrumenting modern stacks, navigating sampling quotas, and integrating fragmented tools turns observability into a heavy lift, one that demands constant coordination between R&D, ops, and security.

Shedding the “old On-Prem” mindset

For years, on-prem observability was seen as a last resort an option reserved for banks, governments, or highly regulated enterprises. It usually came with long procurement cycles, custom contracts, and dedicated support teams. For most engineering teams, it was simply out of reach. Too complex, too expensive, and too rigid to be practical.

BYOC changes that. It brings the benefits of on-prem, like full control and data sovereignty, without the weight of traditional on-premise overhead. In today’s infrastructure landscape, BYOC deployments can be fully managed by the vendor, including security patches, upgrades and auto-scaling. They’re simple to spin up with just a few clicks or through infrastructure-as-code, run seamlessly across any Kubernetes environment, and scale effortlessly with your workloads.

It’s a fundamental shift: the power and privacy of on-prem, reimagined with the flexibility of modern cloud-native tooling.

How groundcover built its platform on BYOC

At groundcover, BYOC isn’t a checkbox, it’s the foundation. From day one, we built our platform to run inside customer environments. There is no multi-tenant SaaS version. We call this model inCloud.

With inCloud, your deployment is part of our production, we monitor it, patch it, and support it with an SLA, just as we do with our own systems. The only difference? It lives in your infrastructure.

You get a fully managed deployment experience, whether you’re a 10-person startup or a global enterprise. The platform runs on Kubernetes with high-performance storage engines like ClickHouse and VictoriaMetrics, scaling seamlessly as your needs grow. Telemetry data never leaves your environment, meeting even the strictest compliance requirements. And because the architecture is fully transparent and documented, you’re never locked in or left guessing.

The economic case for BYOC

Ask any infrastructure engineer, and they’ll tell you- storing metrics in a self-hosted Prometheus is far more affordable than sending them out to a third-party vendor. The problem isn’t the cost, but the operational overhead. Running and scaling observability stacks like ELK or custom pipelines takes time, skill, and people- luxuries many teams don’t have.

SaaS came along as the convenient fix, taking infrastructure management off your hands. But that convenience came with its own cost. Ingestion-based pricing models tied your bill directly to your data volume, punishing you for collecting more telemetry just when you needed it most. And as regulations tightened, pushing sensitive data into a third-party cloud became a growing compliance concern.

It left teams stuck between two difficult options: the ease of SaaS with rising, unpredictable costs, or the affordability of self-hosting, with all the complexity that comes with it.

BYOC breaks that trade-off. It gives teams the best of all worlds: the cost control of self-hosting, the hands-off experience of SaaS, and the data security of on-prem. No per-GB fees, no compliance headaches, and no operational burden.

The future of observability is here

We’re at an inflection point. Traditional SaaS pricing doesn’t work at scale. DIY observability is too complex for most teams to sustain. And pushing telemetry into someone else’s cloud is no longer a safe or compliant bet.

BYOC isn’t a luxury anymore, it’s a necessity. At groundcover, we’ve built around this model not because it’s trendy, but because it solves real, day-to-day challenges for modern teams. Observability should scale with your needs. It should respect your data. And it should help, not hinder, your ability to operate at speed.