Zhivko Todorov
ALL CASE STUDIES

CASE 108 · CALYPSO · 2025

BYOKKMSXKSCOMPLIANCE

Customer keys, in the customer’s custody.

A B2B SaaS company had been losing enterprise deals over a recurring objection: "we want our data encrypted with keys we control, not keys you control." We added BYOK support via AWS KMS External Key Store and unblocked $3.6M in pipeline.

INDUSTRY

B2B SaaS

DOMAIN

SECURITY

DELIVERED

2025

STACK

KMS EXTERNAL KEY STORE·XKS PROXY·CUSTOMER HSM·AURORA POSTGRES·S3·IAM

RESULTS

What changed, by the numbers.

PIPELINE UNBLOCKED

$3.6M

PREVIOUSLY BLOCKED BY KEY OWNERSHIP

CUSTOMERS LIVE ON BYOK

6

IN FIRST QUARTER

KEY-USE AUDIT TRAIL

CRYPTO-VERIFIED

XKS LOGS

PERFORMANCE OVERHEAD

+8ms p95

KMS CALLS

HOW IT WENT

The objection had been recurring. Enterprises with strong key-custody requirements wanted to hold the master keys in their own HSMs, with the SaaS vendor able to use them only when the customer permitted. KMS Customer-Managed Keys hold the keys in AWS; only XKS holds them in the customer’s domain.

We integrated XKS via the customer’s on-prem (or cloud-of-their-choice) HSM through the XKS Proxy specification. The SaaS application uses standard KMS API calls; KMS routes the cryptographic operations to the customer’s HSM and never sees the key material itself.

Six enterprise customers live on BYOK in the first quarter post-launch, unblocking $3.6M in pipeline that had been stalled on this single requirement. Performance overhead at p95 is +8ms, well within the SaaS’s latency budget. The key-use audit trail is cryptographically verifiable on the customer side.

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