Data Sovereignty

Central to the design of HEAT is a focus on maintaining control over data. Whether you’re operating in a tightly regulated industry or simply value strong data governance, HEAT is designed from the ground up to support data sovereignty.

Where does your data go?

HEAT is a platform that connects, processes, and visualizes data, but it doesn’t take ownership of your data. All captured data is stored in a location of your choosing. You can configure HEAT to:

Use a local, in-cluster blobstore managed by the HEAT environment.
Push data to a cloud-based blobstore that you control.
Integrate with external databases or blobstores entirely outside of the HEAT platform.

Once ingested, your data remains in the configured storage location and is only accessed when needed by processing components within the HEAT environment, or when displaying dashboards.

In the above example, you can use our internally managed blobstore, or an external blobstore, which can exist in Azure or an S3 compatible service you manage. Our internal blobstore is high-performance and recommended for development.

How is it stored?

When HEAT ingests data, it is placed into a blobstore, which is a highly durable and scalable storage mechanism. You decide whether that blobstore is local, cloud-hosted, or external. Only services within the Kubernetes cluster, specifically, the runners, can access this data.

The storage layer is not exposed publicly. There’s no external S3-compatible access enabled in production environments.

Metadata such as session names or configuration options may be stored in HEAT’s internal services, but this data contains no personal information by default. Session data is decoupled from user identity.

How secure is it?

Security is foundational in HEAT’s architecture:

All data storage and processing occurs within a secure Kubernetes cluster.
The internal blobstore and databases are not accessible from outside the cluster.
Services that require access to your data, like runners, run inside the cluster and only access what is necessary.
Authentication is externalized, even our built-in provider runs as a separate system. If your identity system is disabled, HEAT cannot access or correlate users to data.

In production deployments, development/debugging endpoints are disabled to ensure minimal attack surface.

How long do we hold your data?

HEAT itself does not enforce a retention policy, you are in control. Since your storage is configurable, you decide how long data is kept and when it’s deleted.

If the blobstore becomes unavailable or is deleted, the system will no longer be able to render dashboards or recover insights, as HEAT does not keep internal copies of session data beyond the initial ingestion.

Summary

HEAT is designed to respect your sovereignty and privacy:

You choose where your data lives.
You control access and retention.
No personal data is stored in the core system.
Removing access to your blobstore disables access to your data.

This gives you full control over your data lifecycle, from ingestion to deletion, in a secure, transparent way.