Air-Gapped Deployment

Classified environments, regulated industries, and critical-infrastructure operators often require no outbound internet from production. Safeguard ships a complete air-gapped deployment that runs every capability — scanning, reachability, Griffin, Eagle, Lino, Gold, self-healing — inside your perimeter.

What Runs Air-Gapped

Every product and platform capability has an air-gapped equivalent:

• ESSCM, Portal, TPRM, OSM — the full web app.
• Griffin / Eagle / Lino — quantized builds that run on customer GPUs.
• Zero: it has no model weights and runs in process on the platform, so it answers data questions with no model inference.
• Continuous scanning — driven by delta-shipped vulnerability feeds.
• MCP Server, API, CLI, Desktop App, Runner — all available.
• Kubernetes admission controller — admits images without needing cloud connectivity.
• Self-healing containers — rebuilds inside your environment using your mirrored registries.

Reference Architecture

    Upstream snapshot bundle         Your air-gapped perimeter
    ─────────────────────────         ─────────────────────────
    Safeguard Cloud ──(signed)──►  Receiver ──► Safeguard Control Plane
                                   (daily /        │
                                   hourly)         ├── Web App
                                                   ├── API + MCP
                                                   ├── Inference (Griffin/Eagle/Lino)
                                                   ├── Scanner
                                                   ├── Gold Mirror
                                                   └── Storage (Postgres, S3-compat, Vault)

• A snapshot bundle ships from Safeguard on your chosen cadence.
• The Receiver is a DMZ-positioned service that verifies signatures and pushes deltas to the Control Plane.
• The Control Plane runs every Safeguard component.
• No component inside the perimeter ever calls outbound.

Snapshot Contents

Each signed bundle contains:

• Vulnerability feed deltas (NVD, GitHub Advisory, OSV, Safeguard Research, CISA KEV, EPSS daily).
• Gold artifact deltas (tarballs and OCI layers).
• Eagle classification model deltas (behavioral signatures).
• Policy template updates.
• Platform binaries when releases ship.

Every bundle is signed with Safeguard's air-gap signing key and independently verifiable against a public transparency log (or a private transparency log for classified tenancies).

Delivery Options

Cadence configurable from hourly down to quarterly.

Install Footprint

Minimum for a production air-gapped deployment:

• Kubernetes cluster (OpenShift / EKS-Anywhere / Rancher / vanilla k8s) — 3 control-plane, 6 worker nodes.
• Postgres 15+.
• S3-compatible object storage (MinIO, CephRGW, AWS on GovCloud).
• Optional GPU pool for Griffin/Eagle/Lino inference (A10 / L4 / H100 depending on scale).

Scaled down, a single-node POC works for evaluations; we ship a 1-VM appliance image for that case.

Inference at the Edge

For scenarios where even the air-gapped site can't afford GPU time:

• CPU-only quantized builds of Griffin, Eagle, Lino — usable for triage and summarization, slower than GPU.
• Batch inference mode — queue analysis jobs and process nightly.
• Retrieval-only mode — static answers from the shipped knowledge base without live inference.

Compliance

Air-gapped Safeguard is the default deployment for:

• DoD IL4 / IL5.
• FedRAMP HIGH (with authorized boundary configuration).
• NERC CIP (critical electric infrastructure).
• CMMC Level 3.
• ITAR / EAR-controlled environments.
• China MLPS 2.0 Level 3 — with separate tenancy in country.

See Compliance for the full framework matrix.

Operational Runbook

Install

The install runbook is provided as a private repository to authorized tenants. It covers:

• Pre-deployment hardening baselines.
• Helm values with safe defaults.
• Day-0 signing key ceremony.
• Disaster recovery and restore.

Upgrade

• Validate the new snapshot bundle signatures.
• Blue/green Helm install in a new namespace.
• Cutover through your ingress.
• Keep the prior namespace for one release cycle as rollback.

Key Rotation

• Signing keys rotate on a configurable cadence (default: annually).
• Rotation is a two-person, signed, logged operation.
• Both old and new keys are trusted for a grace period during rotation.

Access

Because the control plane is air-gapped, access uses:

• Your existing SSO (SAML / OIDC) against your directory.
• Bastion hosts or PAM-gated access for operators.
• SCIM sync inside the perimeter.

Support

Air-gapped tenants get:

• A named customer engineer.
• A secure one-way channel for snapshot delivery issues.
• Hot-patch bundles for critical zero-days with accelerated signing.
• Quarterly on-site architecture reviews (Enterprise).

Related

• Continuous Scanning — air-gapped scan cadence.
• AI Models — on-prem inference builds.
• Compliance — regulatory environments that require air-gapped deployment.