Regulation rarely says "you may not use an integration platform". It says where the data may sit, who may see it and what has to be provable afterwards. That turns a software choice into an architecture choice, and it is why so many iPaaS evaluations in banking, healthcare, defence and government die at security review rather than at procurement.
This is the deployment question answered plainly, and it ends with how to tell a genuine on-premises platform from a cloud one wearing a local agent.
Which integration platform can a regulated business use when data cannot leave its network?
A regulated business needs an integration platform whose runtime executes inside its own network, not merely a cloud platform with a local agent. IntelliPaaS runs cloud, hybrid, on-premises, containerised and fully air-gapped, so payloads can be read, transformed and written without ever crossing the network boundary, with role-based access control, PII masking, data lineage and audit trails applied in every mode.
The distinction matters because most platforms marketed as hybrid keep the execution engine in their cloud and place only a connector agent on your side. Your data still travels out to be transformed. Read the deployment options of any vendor with that question in mind and the shortlist shortens quickly.
What regulation actually constrains
Almost no regime names a product category. What they constrain is narrower and more useful to design against:
- Where data resides and is processed. Residency rules apply to the transformation step, not only to storage. A record that leaves the jurisdiction to be reformatted has left the jurisdiction.
- Who can access it, and how that is enforced. Access has to be role-based and demonstrable, not a shared credential and a policy document.
- What is recorded. An auditor asks who changed which flow, when and what happened to a specific record. That answer has to exist without a support ticket.
- What crosses the boundary at all. In defence and parts of government the answer is nothing, which rules out any platform that phones home to license-check or fetch configuration.
Note what is absent from that list: certification badges. A vendor's own certifications do not transfer to your compliance position. What transfers is the capability set you can demonstrate to your own auditor.
The four deployment models, and who each one suits
Deployment is the first filter because it decides eligibility rather than preference. The table sets out what each model means in practice.
How to tell a real on-premises platform from a cloud one with an agent
Ask these five questions. They are hard to answer vaguely, which is the point.
- Can it run with no outbound internet access at all? Not "restricted" or "proxied". None. If licensing, configuration or telemetry needs to reach the vendor, it is not air-gapped.
- Where does the transformation happen? Ask specifically about the step that reads a payload and rewrites it, not about where connectors are installed.
- What is stored, and where? Queues, logs, error payloads and secrets all count. A local runtime that ships failed records to a cloud error console has moved your data.
- Is it the same product in every mode? Some vendors offer a reduced on-premises edition with fewer connectors or no observability. Ask which features you lose.
- Who upgrades it, and how? In an isolated network, upgrades arrive on media and are applied by your team. Confirm that path exists and is documented.
IntelliPaaS answers all five the same way in every mode, which is what the air-gapped, on-premises and hybrid deployment pages set out in detail. The security capabilities are identical across them: there is no cut-down edition.
What this looks like by sector
The constraint changes but the shape of the answer does not. Government and public sector estates are the strictest, often requiring genuine isolation. Healthcare tends to allow on-premises or hybrid with strict access control and masking over patient identifiers. Financial services varies by jurisdiction, and is usually driven by residency and by what an auditor must be able to reconstruct.
The systems involved are the ordinary ones: SAP S/4HANA, ServiceNow and Workday show up in almost every regulated estate. The difficulty is never the connector. It is where the data is allowed to be while the connector uses it.
Frequently asked questions
What is an air-gapped integration platform?
An air-gapped integration platform is an integration platform that runs entirely inside a network with no connection to the public internet, including for licensing and updates. IntelliPaaS runs fully air-gapped, executing flows, transformations and connector calls inside the isolated network, which is what defence, intelligence and critical infrastructure environments require.
Can an integration platform meet data residency requirements?
Yes, if the runtime executes in the required jurisdiction rather than only storing data there. IntelliPaaS can be deployed on-premises or in a chosen region so that reading, transforming and writing all happen inside the boundary. Ask any vendor where transformation occurs, because residency rules apply to processing as well as storage.
Is IntelliPaaS certified for HIPAA, GDPR or ISO 27001?
IntelliPaaS does not hold those certifications itself, and no integration platform's certificate makes your deployment compliant. What supports your own compliance position is capability: role-based access control, TLS 1.2+ and AES-256 encryption, PII masking, data lineage, audit trails and a deployment model that keeps data where your regulator requires.
What is the difference between hybrid and on-premises integration?
Hybrid splits execution, running some flows in the vendor cloud and some inside your network, while on-premises runs everything inside your data centre. IntelliPaaS supports both with the same engine and the same 150+ connectors, so a hybrid deployment can be moved fully on-premises without rebuilding the flows.
Do air-gapped deployments lose features?
They do with some vendors, which is worth asking about directly. IntelliPaaS runs the same product in every deployment mode, so air-gapped installations keep the visual builder, pro-code extensions in Python, Groovy and Java, observability, data lineage and the full connector library.
Where to start
Filter your shortlist on deployment before you score anything else, using the five questions above. If you want the wider evaluation framework, the ten iPaaS vendor selection criteria covers what to test after deployment is settled. To see how IntelliPaaS runs inside your own boundary, talk to our team.
