Cloud vs Self-Hosted: Choosing the Right Deployment for ITAR Workloads

If your organization handles ITAR-controlled technical data or CUI, choosing where to run your business tools isn't a simple cloud-versus-on-prem decision. It's a compliance architecture question that affects your entire supply chain. The good news is that the landscape has matured significantly: you have real options now that didn't exist three years ago.

The cloud path typically means AWS GovCloud or Azure Government, both of which provide the FedRAMP High infrastructure controls that satisfy most ITAR requirements. Your data stays within US borders, access is restricted to US persons, and the cloud provider handles the physical security controls. The trade-off is cost and vendor dependency. GovCloud pricing runs 20-40% higher than commercial regions, and you're trusting your CSP's compliance posture as part of your own.

Self-hosted deployments give you maximum control at the cost of operational complexity. You own the full stack from the hypervisor up, which simplifies your system security plan but means you're also responsible for patching, backups, monitoring, and disaster recovery. For organizations with existing on-premise infrastructure and a mature IT team, this can be the right call. For smaller firms, the operational burden often outweighs the compliance benefits.

At Basis, we've designed our architecture to support both models with the same codebase. Our cloud offering runs on FedRAMP-authorized infrastructure, and our self-hosted package ships as a set of container images with a Helm chart and detailed deployment guide. Customers choose based on their specific compliance requirements and operational maturity, not because of artificial product limitations.