Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

What Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) means in practice

Bring Your Own Key gives a customer cryptographic control over their data at rest in a cloud service: the customer holds the key, the vendor holds the ciphertext, and the customer can revoke access by deleting the key. BYOK is often marketed as a sovereignty solution but it does not address the harder questions. Inference still runs on vendor infrastructure with vendor-controlled compute. The model weights are still the vendor's. The decision to deprecate a model version is still the vendor's. For regulators who care about model lifecycle artefacts and inference control — SAMA, RBI, the EU AI Act — BYOK satisfies one column of the compliance matrix and leaves three others open.