The Bring Your Own Cloud Movement: Nuon's Solution for Enterprise AI Deployment

This post is part of our ERC 2025 recap series. Read the full recap post here.

At Enterprise Ready Conference 2025, John Morehouse, co-founder and CEO of Nuon, presented a compelling solution to one of the most challenging problems facing modern SaaS companies: how to deploy applications into customer-controlled cloud environments while maintaining operational control.

The Shift from Multi-Tenant to Customer-Hosted

The traditional SaaS model is straightforward. Companies like Slack, Salesforce, and Dropbox run multi-tenant applications in their own AWS accounts, serving thousands of customers from shared infrastructure. This approach has powered the SaaS revolution for the past two decades.

But the AI era is changing customer requirements. As Morehouse explained on stage, enterprises are increasingly concerned about where their data lives. Privacy requirements, compliance mandates, and geographic data residency regulations are driving a fundamental shift in how software gets deployed. Customers now say, "I want your app, but I want to run it in my cloud environment."

This demand throws a wrench into the traditional deployment model. Everything about how you've been shipping software needs to change.

Why Bring Your Own Cloud Matters Now

The Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployment model addresses several critical enterprise concerns. When customers deploy your application in their own AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts, they maintain direct control over their data. They get stronger security guarantees. And critically, they maintain business continuity even when third-party services experience outages.

Morehouse pointed to recent high-profile incidents as motivation: "If something like Monday happens, you have some control as to whether or not your critical systems are down." This resonates particularly with regulated industries like finance, banking, and government, where data sovereignty and operational control are non-negotiable requirements.

The Technical Challenge of BYOC

During his demo, Morehouse highlighted why BYOC is "actually quite hard to build on your own." You need to figure out how to package your application, enable customers to install it in environments where you might not even have access, and then manage updates and troubleshooting remotely.

The paradox is clear: customers request BYOC precisely because they don't fully trust external vendors between them and their business. Yet vendors still need operational visibility to support these deployments effectively.

Nuon's Approach to Change Management

Nuon's platform provides a control plane that sits between vendors and customer environments. As Morehouse demonstrated live on stage, their system can detect when customers make unauthorized changes to application configurations, alert the vendor, and provide tools to remediate issues without requiring direct access to customer infrastructure.

Drift Detection and Remediation

In the live demo, Morehouse played the role of a customer operator who made changes directly to a Kubernetes config map in their cluster. Within moments, Nuon's control plane detected the drift from the intended application state and flagged the issue for the vendor team.

The vendor could then initiate a remediation deploy to restore the application to its correct configuration, all without needing credentials or direct access to the customer's Kubernetes cluster. This "layer between you and your customer" means customers don't need to understand how to run your app, and vendors don't need intimate knowledge of each customer's environment.

Approval Workflows

The second part of Nuon's enterprise change controls involves approval workflows. When pushing changes to customer accounts, vendors need assurance that deployments match expectations. Nuon provides a structured approval process where changes can be reviewed before being applied, giving both vendors and customers confidence in the deployment process.

This creates what Morehouse calls "that SaaS experience" even in customer-hosted environments. Vendors can develop their applications, push changes, and customers can accept those changes with appropriate oversight and control.

The Enterprise-Ready Imperative

As WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich pointed out, "there's really nothing more enterprise-ready than deploying to your customer's cloud for regulated industries." This deployment model is becoming table stakes for companies moving upmarket, particularly those building AI applications where data sensitivity is paramount.

Geographic requirements add another layer of complexity. Certain regions in Germany, Australia, and other countries mandate that data remain within specific jurisdictions. Traditional multi-tenant SaaS simply cannot meet these requirements.

What This Means for SaaS Companies

The rise of BYOC represents a fundamental shift in enterprise software delivery. For companies building for regulated industries or pursuing truly enterprise-scale customers, the ability to deploy into customer-controlled environments is transitioning from differentiator to requirement.

Nuon's approach suggests that this doesn't have to mean building entirely custom deployment infrastructure for each enterprise deal. By providing standardized tooling for packaging, deploying, and managing applications across customer clouds, platforms like Nuon can help SaaS companies scale BYOC deployments without scaling operational complexity proportionally.

The challenge for modern SaaS companies isn't whether to support customer-hosted deployments, but how to do so while maintaining the operational efficiency and developer experience that made SaaS successful in the first place.

Nuon was a sponsor at Enterprise Ready Conference 2025. Learn more about bringing your own cloud deployments to your enterprise customers at their website.

Read our full ERC recap post here.