Engineering · 9 April 2026 · 5 min read

Air-gapped by default: deployment is a configuration choice

The same product should run as a cloud demo and as a fully offline fusion centre — without re-platforming. Here's how we think about deployment posture.

Sensitive work has a hard requirement that most software treats as an afterthought: some data can never touch the internet. Bolting an offline mode onto a cloud-first product tends to produce a diminished, divergent second system.

We build the other way around. CLERINT runs as a managed cloud instance for open, unclassified work; on agency infrastructure with SSO and hardened tenants for restricted workloads; and as a one-command offline deployment — local models, offline map tiles, no outbound network — for classified work.

Crucially, it is the same product across all three. The deployment tier is a configuration choice, not a different codebase. The UI, the APIs and the analytical layer are identical whether you are running a demo or an air-gapped enclave.

That symmetry is a discipline as much as an architecture. It means no feature ships that cannot run offline, no dependency creeps in that assumes a call home, and no analytical capability quietly degrades when the network disappears. What you evaluate in the cloud is exactly what you operate in the vault.

That is what lets a team start with a scoped cloud pilot and move to a fully isolated production deployment without relearning the tool — or leaving a single byte outside the perimeter they define.

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