Four terms get used interchangeably in this market — self-hosted, BYOC, hybrid and air-gapped — and they describe four materially different data paths. This guide defines each one precisely, gives you the due-diligence questions to put to any vendor, and shows how to verify the answers during a pilot rather than after one.
This page is deliberately vendor-neutral. The checklist and the validation method apply to DocxIntel exactly as they apply to anyone else, and the Proof of Value exists so that our answers can be tested in your environment rather than believed.
Almost nobody chooses to run infrastructure for the pleasure of it. Teams arrive at on-premise document processing because one of these six constraints made the alternative impossible.
Sector regulation frequently requires that specified categories of data are stored and processed inside a national boundary. Once a document is transmitted for processing, it has been processed wherever the endpoint sits.
Government and defence buyers increasingly need to know that a capability keeps working regardless of a foreign vendor relationship, an export-control change or a service withdrawal.
Litigation files, investigation material and board papers carry confidentiality duties that make third-party transmission an issue of professional obligation, not just of preference.
Some networks have no internet path by design. Software either runs inside that boundary with everything it needs, or it does not run there at all. There is no partial answer.
Plenty of organisations have an internal rule that customer documents do not leave the network, independent of any regulator. Architecture has to satisfy the policy as written, not the policy as argued.
Per-page pricing is a rounding error at pilot scale and a permanent, growing line item at production scale — particularly for organisations whose archive keeps expanding.
This is the single most useful distinction in the category, and it is the one most often blurred — sometimes deliberately, more often because the terms genuinely drifted. Read these four definitions before you read any vendor datasheet.
You run the containers or virtual machines. That is the whole claim. It says nothing about whether the deployment needs outbound connectivity to function, who controls the images, or whether the model weights are readable artifacts on your disk. A genuinely self-hosted product can still call home for licence validation, telemetry, or a model download on first start.
Vendor-controlled workloads run inside your cloud subscription. Your documents stay in your tenant, which is a real and often sufficient answer to a residency requirement. It is not an air-gap: there is normally a hosted control plane, cloud-provider dependency and a vendor upgrade path. It is also commonly gated behind the top commercial tier.
Part of the pipeline runs locally and part runs in the vendor cloud — often local pre-processing with cloud inference, or local inference with cloud orchestration and model serving. Hybrid can be an excellent engineering compromise. It is only a problem when it is described as on-premise, because at least one stage still transmits data.
The deployment functions with the outbound route removed. No licence check-in, no telemetry, no model fetch, no fallback call to a cloud endpoint when a local model is uncertain. Updates arrive as signed offline packages you import on your own schedule. This is a testable claim, which is what makes it worth insisting on.
Use this to place any vendor proposal into the right column before you compare prices. Two products in different columns are not competing products, whatever the category label says.
Where the page is read
Outbound connectivity required
Who holds the model weights
Satisfies a strict residency rule
Deployable on an isolated network
Vendor is a processor for your documents
Typical pricing model
Cost of reprocessing an archive
How updates arrive
Operational burden on you
Time to first result
Keeps running if the vendor relationship ends
Archetypes are generalised from publicly documented behaviour across the document AI market as of 2026. Individual vendors vary and change their offerings frequently — verify against current vendor documentation, and place a specific proposal in a column only after reading its data-flow diagram. The highlighted column describes how DocxIntel is built; it is not a claim that every on-premise product behaves this way.
Written to be pasted straight into an RFP. Every one has a verifiable answer, and a vendor who cannot answer in writing has told you something useful.
Ask DocxIntel all sixteen. The Proof of Value is structured so that the answers can be verified in your own environment, with your own logs and your own documents, rather than accepted on trust.
A pilot that only measures accuracy has tested half the product. These five exercises test the architecture, and they cost almost nothing to run alongside the accuracy work.
Give the deployment no default route and no DNS forwarder. Then run a representative batch end to end. Anything that needs the internet will surface immediately, and it will surface in your logs rather than in a conversation.
Do not rely on the vendor to report its own connections. Capture at your firewall and resolver for the whole pilot window, including start-up, an update import and an idle overnight period when telemetry usually fires.
Three hundred to five hundred real documents in your actual mix — phone photographs, handwritten Arabic, stamped pages, multi-generation faxes, packets that need splitting. Adjudicate the ground truth once and score each field independently.
Do not defer this to production. Verify the package signature, import it on the isolated segment, re-run the golden set and compare field-level output before and after. This is also how you find out whether rollback works.
Export the extracted data in a format you can use elsewhere, confirm which artifacts remain yours if the contract ends, and record the answers in the contract rather than in the pilot report.
Vendor-neutral answers to the questions that come up in every air-gapped evaluation.
Strictly, it means the software and the models run on infrastructure your organisation controls, and no document or derived text is transmitted to a third party in order to be processed. The word is used far more loosely than that in the market — it is regularly applied to vendor-managed containers in your cloud account, and sometimes to a cloud service with a local upload agent. Ask for the data-flow diagram, not the label.
