What bring-your-own-key (BYOK) means and how platforms differ — and the effect on cost and data control for Irish businesses.

dgm is an independent osFoundry implementation partner — not affiliated with osFoundry’s developer (the company OS LLC), and it has not yet completed any client integrations.

The bring-your-own-key (BYOK) principle means you bring your own key from the model provider into the platform. It has a direct effect on cost and data control.

Why BYOK matters

  • Cost — with BYOK you pay the model costs directly to the provider, with no per-seat licence.
  • Model choice — you can bring keys from several providers and choose for each task, including a European model like Mistral.
  • Data control — you keep the relationship with the model provider and decide where the running happens.

osFoundry makes BYOK the default: keys are stored encrypted in the workspace and available to every agent, app and workflow.

What about data protection and residency?

osFoundry pins the data region to the United States, the EU or Japan, runs models locally on your own hardware, and supports self-hosting (BYO Cloud) on a cloud account you control. An EU region keeps data inside the EEA — and that satisfies GDPR for most businesses, because there is no Irish rule requiring personal data to physically stay in Ireland. There is, however, no dedicated managed hyperscaler region “in osFoundry” for Ireland; to keep data solely in the country the honest path is self-hosting in an Irish cloud region — Amazon Web Services has eu-west-1 (Dublin, generally available since 2007, three availability zones) and Microsoft Azure has North Europe (Dublin, Grange Castle, generally available since 2009), while Google Cloud has no Ireland region (the nearest are Belgium and London) — or running open-weight models locally. One honest nuance on capacity: Ireland lifted the de-facto data-centre connection moratorium under a stringent new regime (the CRU policy effective 12 December 2025), but EirGrid will not connect new data centres in the Greater Dublin Area until around 2028; existing AWS and Azure capacity in Dublin is operational and usable today. In financial services, cloud and ICT third-party risk is governed by DORA, supervised by the Central Bank of Ireland.

How dgm helps

dgm is an independent implementation partner that helps businesses in Ireland adopt osFoundry — from identifying the first practical use case, through building it, to connecting AI to the systems you already use. dgm works independently of osFoundry’s developer (the company OS LLC) and has not yet completed any client integrations; everything above is therefore a description of the service offered, not a delivered result. If you would like to look at a sensible first step, dgm is happy to think it through with you. Arrange a no-obligation conversation with dgm.