BYOK explained: bring your own key to the AI model: a clear, fact-based explanation for Irish businesses, with osFoundry as the example and dgm as an independent partner.

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.

BYOK explained: bring your own key to the AI model — a practical, clear explanation for Irish businesses, grounded in the reality of the market.

The idea in brief

This guide explains the topic in plain language aimed at what is useful for your decision: what it is, why it matters, and how to start with one small, measurable step. osFoundry is a model-agnostic AI orchestration platform built on the bring-your-own-key (BYOK) principle: usage-based pricing with no per-seat licence, it runs locally (local-first) and can be self-hosted, and it lets you pin the data region (United States, EU or Japan) or run in your own cloud.

How to adopt it in your business

Start with a real bottleneck, set a clear measure of success and test on a small scale before you scale. At each step take account of data protection under GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 (supervised by the Data Protection Commission) and keep human control over sensitive outputs.

Keeping data in Ireland

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.