Self-Hosted AI Agents: Full Control Over Your Data and Infrastructure

Why Self-Hosting Matters for AI

Most AI solutions require sending your data to third-party servers. For many organizations—especially those in healthcare, finance, or legal sectors—this creates unacceptable risks. Data leaves your control, passes through unknown infrastructure, and may be used for model training without your explicit consent.

Self-hosted AI agents eliminate these concerns. Your data never leaves your network. You control the infrastructure, the models, and the entire processing pipeline. This is not just a privacy feature—it is a fundamental architectural decision that affects compliance, security, and operational independence.

Technical Architecture of Self-Hosted Agents

Our self-hosted agents are designed for deployment flexibility. They can run on:

• On-premise servers — Physical or virtual machines in your data center
• Private cloud environments — AWS VPC, Azure Private Link, GCP VPC
• Air-gapped networks — For maximum isolation requirements
• Kubernetes clusters — Containerized deployments with horizontal scaling

Each agent is packaged as a containerized application with clearly defined resource requirements. We provide deployment manifests for Docker Compose, Kubernetes, and Nomad. The agents communicate through standard protocols (REST, gRPC, webhooks) and can integrate with your existing service mesh.

Data Processing Without External Dependencies

Self-hosted agents can operate with local language models or with your own API keys for external model providers. This gives you control over:

• Which models process your data
• Where inference happens (local GPU, cloud API with your keys)
• Data retention and logging policies
• Cost management and rate limiting

For organizations that require fully offline operation, we can configure agents to use locally-deployed models such as Llama, Mistral, or fine-tuned models specific to your domain.

Compliance and Regulatory Requirements

Self-hosting simplifies compliance with regulations that mandate data residency:

• GDPR — Keep EU citizen data within EU infrastructure
• HIPAA — Maintain required controls over protected health information
• SOC 2 — Demonstrate clear boundaries and access controls
• Industry-specific regulations — Banking, insurance, government requirements

When auditors ask where your data is processed, you can point to your own infrastructure with complete documentation of data flows.

Security Model

Self-hosted deployments inherit your existing security posture:

• Network segmentation and firewall rules you already enforce
• Identity and access management through your existing providers (LDAP, SAML, OIDC)
• Encryption at rest using your key management system
• Audit logging integrated with your SIEM

We provide security documentation including architecture diagrams, data flow mappings, and threat models. Our agents are built following secure development practices and undergo regular security reviews.

Operational Considerations

Self-hosting requires operational capacity. You need infrastructure to run the agents, monitoring to ensure availability, and processes for updates. We address this through:

• Clear resource requirements — CPU, memory, storage specifications per agent
• Health check endpoints — Standard endpoints for your monitoring tools
• Structured logging — JSON logs compatible with ELK, Datadog, Splunk
• Update procedures — Documented upgrade paths with rollback capabilities

For organizations that want self-hosting without full operational burden, we offer managed maintenance where we handle updates and monitoring while you retain infrastructure control.

When Self-Hosting Makes Sense

Self-hosted AI agents are appropriate when:

• Regulatory requirements mandate data residency
• Your security policy prohibits sending data to third-party services
• You process sensitive information (healthcare records, financial data, legal documents)
• You need predictable costs without per-API-call pricing
• You want to avoid vendor lock-in and maintain portability

If these constraints do not apply to your situation, cloud-hosted solutions may offer faster deployment. We help you evaluate the trade-offs based on your specific requirements.

Getting Started

We begin with an infrastructure assessment to understand your environment, security requirements, and operational capabilities. From there, we design agents that fit within your constraints and deploy them following your change management processes.

Learn more about how we build AI agents or explore backend automation use cases that benefit from self-hosted deployment.