Dedicated Cloud Environment

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This page applies to Appian Cloud only. It may not reflect the differences with Appian Government Cloud.

The capabilities described on this page are included in Appian's advanced and premium capability tiers.

Appian's Dedicated Cloud Environment (DCE) gives your organization a fully isolated deployment of the Appian platform within Appian Cloud. This page explains what DCE is, what it includes, how it compares to other deployment options, how to migrate to DCE, and answers to common questions.

What is a Dedicated Cloud Environment?

A Dedicated Cloud Environment (DCE) is an Appian Cloud deployment where every layer of the infrastructure—compute, networking, storage, platform services, and web content delivery—is provisioned exclusively for your organization. No other Appian customer shares your environment.

DCE is designed for organizations that cannot accept shared infrastructure. Organizations in the following industries can most benefit:

Financial services and banking.
Healthcare and life sciences.
Insurance and wealth management.
Government and public sector.
Defense and intelligence.
Energy and critical infrastructure.

Why choose DCE?

The Dedicated Customer Environment (DCE) offers your organization the following benefits:

Complete tenant isolation. Your Appian Cloud environment runs in its own dedicated compute, networking, storage, and content delivery infrastructure—fully separated from all other customers.
Isolated platform services. Appian services such as Appian Composer, AI agents, DocCenter, AI Skills, Process HQ, RPA, and Autoscale run inside your dedicated environment—your data never crosses tenant boundaries during processing.
Connect your own AI models. Bring your own AI provider to power Appian's generative AI features within your dedicated environment, giving you full control over your AI security and compliance posture.
Dedicated web content delivery. Inbound traffic to your Appian sites, including TLS termination, is handled by infrastructure dedicated to your environment. Your traffic does not traverse shared web infrastructure.
Private connectivity. DCE supports AWS PrivateLink for secure, private network-level access between your corporate network and your Appian environment. With endpoints dedicated to your environment, no public internet exposure required.
Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). Manage your own encryption keys for data at rest within your DCE environment, giving you full control over your cryptographic security posture.
Full platform, fully managed. Appian's Dedicated Cloud Environment supports the core Appian platform capabilities. Your environment is monitored and managed 24/7/365 by Appian's cloud operations team.
Compliance-ready. Choose from Appian's many compliance frameworks to run your Dedicated Cloud Environment, including SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, Canada Protected B, Cyber Essentials Plus, and Infosec Registered Assessors Program (IRAP).

Known limitations of DCE

Single dedicated environment: DCE provides a single dedicated environment for your organization. Separate DCE for additional environments (for example, development, testing, and production envrionments) is not supported.
Unsupported environments: DCE is not supported for Appian Government Cloud - High or Appian Government Cloud - Moderatee.
Unsupported features: DCE does not support:

Comparison to other environments

The following table compares Appian's Dedicated Cloud Environment (DCE) to:

Infrastructure and isolation

The following table compares the infrastructure model and operational responsibilities across each deployment type:

Capability	Dedicated Cloud Environment	Appian Cloud	Dedicated Customer VPC	Appian on Kubernetes
Fully managed by Appian	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Per-tenant isolation	Dedicated AWS account, network, compute, and storage	Shared compute, network, storage	Dedicated network segment only	Self-managed infrastructure
Availability	Any	Any	Any	Any
High Availability	Yes	Yes	Yes	Self-managed
Enhanced Business Continuity	No	Yes	Yes	No
Enhanced Data Pipeline	Yes, with HA	Yes, with HA	Yes, with HA	No
Web content delivery	Dedicated	Shared	Shared	Self-managed

Access and networking

The following table compares private connectivity options across each deployment type:

Option	Dedicated Cloud Environment	Appian Cloud	Dedicated Customer VPC	Appian on Kubernetes
Cloud Secure Link	No	Yes	Yes	No
PrivateLink	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
VPN	Yes	Yes	Yes	Self-managed

Security and encryption

The following table compares security and encryption capabilities across each deployment type:

Capability	Dedicated Cloud Environment	Appian Cloud	Dedicated Customer VPC	Appian on Kubernetes
BYOK disk encryption	Yes	Yes	Yes	Self-managed
Compliance frameworks	Yes	Yes	Yes	Self-managed

Platform capabilities

The following table shows whether each platform capability is available in each deployment type:

Capability	Dedicated Cloud Environment	Appian Cloud	Dedicated Customer VPC	Appian on Kubernetes
AI capabilities	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes¹
Appian Composer	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes¹
Autoscale	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Case Management Studio	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data fabric	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
DocCenter	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes¹
Portals	No	Yes	Yes	No
Process HQ	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
RPA	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

¹ Some AI capabilities require AWS infrastructure. See Set Up Appian AI for Appian on Kubernetes for details on which AI features require AWS and which do not.

Frequently asked questions

How is a DCE different from a self-managed environment?

While a self-managed deployment does offer isolated deployment, your organization is responsible for provisioning, configuring, upgrading, and maintaining all infrastructure, including servers, networking, databases, and platform services. In a Dedicated Cloud Environment (DCE), Appian manages all of that on your behalf—you get full-stack isolation without the operational burden of running your own infrastructure. You also get access to features that are exclusive to Appian Cloud.

How is a DCE different from standard Appian Cloud?

In standard Appian Cloud, multiple customers share the same underlying infrastructure for web delivery, platform services, and networking. In DCE, all infrastructure—compute, network, storage, platform services, and web delivery—is provisioned exclusively for your organization. No other Appian Cloud customer shares any part of your environment.

How is a DCE different from the Dedicated Customer VPC?

For legacy customers using a Dedicated Customer Virtual Private Cloud, this deployment provides network-level isolation only—your Appian sites run in a dedicated network segment, but platform services and web delivery remain shared. DCE goes further: your environment includes a dedicated AWS account, dedicated instances of all Appian platform services, dedicated web content delivery, and fully isolated compute and storage.

How do I get started with DCE?

Contact your Appian account executive to discuss your requirements and begin the ordering process.

How long does DCE provisioning take?

The initial provisioning timeline for DCE is approximately 4–6 weeks from order confirmation. This timeline covers the provisioning of your dedicated AWS account, network, compute cluster, storage, and platform services.

Appian is actively automating the provisioning process to reduce this timeline in future releases.

Can I migrate my existing Appian environment to DCE?

See Transition to DCE for details.

Transition to DCE

Migration to a Dedicated Cloud Environment (DCE) is supported for self-managed environments, including Appian on Kubernetes environments and legacy environments using non-containerized Appian.

To transition to DCE:

Contact your Appian account executive to initiate the provisioning process. Provisioning can take up to 6 weeks.
Work with Appian Support to plan your migration window.

Note: If your environment uses AWS PrivateLink, this window must include a cutover period during which existing connections will be unavailable. PrivateLink endpoints cannot be transferred and must be recreated for DCE.
Appian Support will coordinate the data migration with your team during the scheduled window.
After the migration, verify that your environment is accessible and your applications and data are intact.
Update any DNS, firewall, or network configuration to point to your new DCE environment.

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