The cloud advantage (and its limits) for AI analytics

For many teams launching generative AI projects, cloud-based analytics platforms offer a fast, hassle-free start. A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution can be up and running in minutes, with no infrastructure to manage.

Especially for startups and lean teams, the appeal is clear: quick deployment, automatic updates, and instant scalability. Cloud GenAI analytics let you onboard fast, get value immediately, and offload maintenance to the provider.

But what about larger enterprises or organizations in regulated industries? Here, the convenience of SaaS can come with trade-offs.

By sending user interaction data to an external service, companies may face hurdles around data privacy, regulatory compliance, and internal security policies. While cloud analytics are great for speed, they might not check all the boxes for enterprises that handle sensitive data or strict regulations.

In short, SaaS GenAI analytics solve the “how do we start quickly” problem – but not always the “where is our data and who can see it” problem. Organizations need to balance the benefits of quick onboarding with their responsibility to safeguard data and comply with industry rules. This is where self-hosting emerges as not just a viable option, but often a necessary one.

Why self-Hosting GenAI analytics matters

Self-hosting means deploying your GenAI analytics platform in your own environment – whether in your private cloud or on-premises servers. For enterprises in sectors like finance, healthcare, government, or telecom, this approach can be a game-changer. The core advantages are straightforward and significant:

• Data stays under your control: With a self-hosted solution, all conversational logs and user interaction data remain within your company’s infrastructure. No sensitive prompt or user query ever leaves your network. Nebuly’s platform, for example, can be deployed in your VPC on any major cloud or on-prem, ensuring your data never leaves your environment. This level of control makes it far easier to meet strict data privacy requirements (think patient information in healthcare or financial records in banking).
• Built-in compliance and governance: When you host analytics yourself, you can configure it to meet internal compliance standards and industry regulations by design. Need to comply with GDPR, HIPAA, or regional data residency laws? Keeping the data in-house simplifies that. In fact, Nebuly’s self-hosted deployment was designed to ensure compliance with specific security protocols and regulatory requirements by design. Companies can enforce their own data retention policies, access controls, and audit trails on the analytics data – just as they do with their other internal systems. For instance, administrators can set how long user data is kept and automatically purge it after a chosen period, aligning analytics with corporate retention policies.
• Integration with enterprise systems: Self-hosting lets you plug the analytics platform directly into your enterprise IT ecosystem. User access can be managed via your existing Single Sign-On (SSO) and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) frameworks, ensuring that only the right team members can view sensitive AI usage data. Because the platform lives in your infrastructure, it can interface with internal data warehouses or logging systems more seamlessly. Nebuly’s self-hosted model is built for this kind of flexibility – from custom hardware configurations to software integrations – to meet unique operational needs. In practice, this means the analytics can play nicely with your security monitoring, encryption at rest, and any other IT policies you already have in place.
• Avoiding vendor lock-in: Enterprises are rightly cautious about being tied to a single vendor or a one-size-fits-all cloud environment. A self-hosted GenAI analytics solution gives you the freedom to run on the infrastructure of your choice (Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, or on-premises). If business needs change or you want to migrate environments, you have that flexibility. You’re not constrained by a vendor’s proprietary cloud setup – you retain ownership of the deployment. This not only reduces risk, it can also optimize costs by leveraging infrastructure you already manage.

In summary, self-hosting GenAI user analytics keeps you in the driver’s seat. You gain the rich insights from AI-user interactions without handing over the keys to your data kingdom. For organizations with heavy compliance demands or privacy sensitivities, this approach isn’t just IT preference – it’s often non-negotiable.

Case study: Iveco Group’s self-hosted success

Real-world enterprise examples show the power of self-hosted analytics. Consider Iveco Group, a global automotive manufacturer with over 35,000 employees. As Iveco rolled out dozens of internal AI copilots to assist employees, they faced a challenge familiar to many large companies: how to understand usage and performance across all these AI tools, without compromising on privacy or speed. Traditional feedback collection (surveys, interviews) was too slow and fragmented, so Iveco turned to automated LLM user analytics to get the full picture.

Crucially, Iveco Group deployed Nebuly’s analytics in a self-hosted manner on their own cloud environment. In doing so, they kept all conversational data within their controlled infrastructure while leveraging Nebuly’s advanced user analytics capabilities. The result was an LLM analytics breakthrough: scattered AI tools were unified into a single source of truth on user behavior, delivering 100x more actionable feedback than manual methods could.

Teams and stakeholders gained end-to-end visibility into how employees were actually using each AI copilot, where engagement was high, and where it dropped off – all without any sensitive data leaving Iveco’s domain.

This self-hosted deployment met Iveco’s compliance needs and data governance standards, while empowering their IT and product teams with real-time, unbiased usage insights. In the words of Iveco’s AI team, Nebuly’s platform allowed them to extend intelligence to “100% of our chatbot users with just one click,” replacing guesswork with reliable data across the organization.

Iveco Group’s experience underlines that enterprises don’t have to choose between rigorous data control and cutting-edge AI analytics – with the right approach, they can have both.

Flexibility with Nebuly: cloud or self-hosted on your terms

As the leader in GenAI user analytics, Nebuly recognizes that one size does not fit all. Different organizations have different needs, which is why the Nebuly platform is available in two deployment options from day one: Nebuly Cloud (SaaS) and Nebuly Self-Hosted. We encourage companies to choose the option that best fits their needs, whether you’re a fast-moving AI startup or one of the world’s largest enterprises.

With Nebuly Self-Hosted, you get all the benefits outlined above. You can deploy Nebuly in your own Azure, AWS, or GCP cloud, or even on-premises, via containerized packages. Your data stays on your infrastructure – by design, no conversational data ever leaves your VPC.

This deployment brings enhanced data control and peace of mind: you know exactly where your AI interaction data lives, and you can enforce your security protocols on it. The platform supports integration into your environment, from custom storage to enterprise SSO, so it truly becomes an in-house analytics layer rather than an external black box. And Nebuly doesn’t compromise on ease of use for the sake of security – our Docker-based install and comprehensive docs make standing up a self-hosted instance straightforward.

In other words, we handle the heavy analytics lifting, but you remain master of your data.

With Nebuly Cloud, on the other hand, we host the analytics for you. This SaaS offering is optimized for organizations that prioritize speed and simplicity. If your primary goal is to start capturing AI user insights immediately and you’re comfortable with a cloud service, Nebuly Cloud provides quick deployment and automatic updates so you’re always on the latest version.

Even as a cloud service, Nebuly is built with enterprise-grade security (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001 and GDPR compliance are all in place) – but we handle the infrastructure, letting you focus on using the insights. This option can be ideal for smaller teams or pilot projects where getting up and running in minutes is the top priority.

And because we know needs can change, many Nebuly customers start in our cloud and later transition to self-hosted as they scale – or vice versa. The key is flexibility. We built Nebuly to work within your constraints, not the other way around.

Conclusion

Self-hosting GenAI analytics is no longer a fringe idea – for many enterprises, it’s a strategic choice that enables innovation without sacrificing governance.

In privacy-sensitive sectors, the ability to glean rich user insights from AI interactions while keeping data in-house is a true enabler. It means AI product teams get the feedback and usage data they desperately need, and compliance officers sleep soundly knowing the data never left company control.

At the same time, cloud analytics services continue to serve a valuable role, especially for rapid deployment and early-stage experimentation. This isn’t about declaring one approach “better” than the other in absolute terms – it’s about choosing what’s right for your context.

Nebuly’s stance is simple: we empower you with both options.

Whether you deploy Nebuly self-hosted on your own infrastructure or opt for our managed cloud, you’re getting the industry’s leading GenAI user analytics solution – the only difference is where it lives.

Our enterprise clients like Iveco Group have shown that self-hosting is not only feasible, but tremendously rewarding in large-scale, regulated environments. And our startup users prove that a well-secured SaaS can jump-start AI analytics in record time.

In the end, the goal is the same: turning raw AI user interactions into meaningful insights and business value, safely and effectively.

With Nebuly, you have the freedom to do just that on your own terms – cloud or self-hosted, as a trusted partner in either case. The era of GenAI user analytics is here, and it doesn’t have to compromise on privacy or compliance. For those who need it, self-hosting is ready and available today – and Nebuly will be happy to support you on that journey. Book a demo to see how it works.

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