For most buyers the plan is the easy decision and this is the hard one. It is worth settling in the first conversation rather than at the security review, because it is the constraint that ends projects late. The same MultiSet binary runs in all four modes below, with the same SDK surface, so the choice is about where data sits rather than about which product you get.
| Mode | Where compute runs | Does data leave the site | Typical driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public cloud | MultiSet managed | Yes | Fastest start, lowest operational burden |
| Private cloud / VPC | Your own cloud tenant | Stays within your cloud account | Data residency and procurement policy |
| On-device | The device itself | No | Offline operation, privacy-strict sites, lowest latency |