Bring Your Own Database and Storage (BYOD & BYOS): the complete enterprise guide

Enterprise teams increasingly need helpdesk software that respects data residency, audit requirements, and cloud governance policies. Bring Your Own Database (BYOD) and Bring Your Own Storage (BYOS) on helpefi let you keep workspace data and files in infrastructure you control — while still using the full helpefi product for tickets, AI, knowledge base, and customer support workflows. This guide explains what BYOD and BYOS are, who they are for, what data stays where, which cloud providers are supported, and how to configure, migrate, and operate external infrastructure with confidence. What is Bring Your Own Database (BYOD)? BYOD connects your helpefi workspace to a MySQL database you own and operate. Instead of storing tickets, users, knowledge base content, and settings on helpefi managed database servers, that data lives in your database — for example Amazon RDS MySQL, Amazon Aurora MySQL, or a self hosted MySQL 8.0+ instance in your VPC or data center. When BYOD is enabled, helpefi runs tenant migrations against your database, routes all workspace queries to your connection, and skips creating or dropping managed databases during provisioning and deletion. You retain full control over backups, encryption at rest, instance sizing, and regional placement. What is Bring Your Own Storage (BYOS)? BYOS stores file blobs — ticket attachments, avatars, and other uploaded assets — in object storage you control. Supported drivers include Amazon S3 and Cloudflare R2. helpefi registers a dynamic storage disk per workspace, serves private files through signed URLs, and never requires public bucket access. Object keys follow a predictable prefix layout (for example helpefi/{tenant id}/attachments/...) so you can scope IAM policies or R2 tokens to the minimum required prefix. Why enterprises choose BYOD and BYOS Regulatory and contractual requirements often mandate that customer support data remain in a specific geography or cloud account. BYOD and BYOS address data at rest: tickets, replies, user profiles, knowledge articles, and file attachments can reside entirely in your AWS or Cloudflare account while your team continues using helpefi as the application layer. Security and operations teams also benefit from unified cloud governance. You apply your own backup schedules, encryption keys, VPC security groups, CloudTrail logging, and access reviews to the same infrastructure that already hosts other business systems. helpefi publishes egress IP addresses for database allowlisting so you can restrict inbound MySQL traffic to helpefi application servers only. What stays on helpefi vs what moves to your cloud With BYOD and BYOS enabled, all tenant business data moves to your infrastructure. That includes tickets and replies, users and roles, knowledge base articles and embeddings, helpdesk settings, mail configuration, tenant scoped audit logs, attachment metadata, and the actual file blobs in your bucket. helpefi retains control plane metadata required to operate the platform: workspace identifier, name, and slug; domain mappings for HTTPS routing; subscription and billing identifiers; encrypted infrastructure credentials (connection host, username, and secrets — not your business records); platform audit events for infrastructure changes; and session rows for authentication on shared SaaS. Application servers connect to your RDS instance and S3 or R2 bucket over TLS during normal operation. This satisfies at rest residency in your chosen region. If you require zero helpefi hosted metadata or zero transit through helpefi servers, consider helpefi self hosted or dedicated VPC deployment instead of shared SaaS with BYO. Supported providers and requirements Database: MySQL 8.0 or newer (MySQL 8.4 recommended). Supported deployments include Amazon RDS MySQL, Amazon Aurora MySQL, and self hosted MySQL reachable from helpefi egress IPs on port 3306. Cloudflare D1 and other non MySQL engines are not supported for BYOD. Storage: Amazon S3 (any s...