Evaluation guide
Public cloud vs an on-prem pod is a CMMC question first
When commercial cloud is out of scope — and what you are actually testing if you try a managed pod.
A defense-adjacent startup had a working inference stack on a hyperscaler. Then a customer asked where Controlled Unclassified Information would live. The architecture review lasted two hours. The answer was: it cannot live there. They did not need a bake-off of every GPU cloud. They needed a rule for when the work is forced on premises, and a crisp definition of what “trying a pod” evaluates. Full versus-pages stay on the mothership at pacific.space/comparisons. This site is only the decision guide.
The cloud question is residency, not a price war
CMMC Level 2 covers 110 NIST 800-171 controls. Work that touches CUI or ITAR cannot be sent to commercial clouds or public AI APIs. That is a boundary fact, not a discounting problem. If your review still starts with list price per GPU-hour, you are evaluating the wrong axis. Start on Pacific’s CMMC on-prem page — it is explicit that a pod does not certify your organization.
What you are actually trying
An evaluation is not a weekend of tokens. You are testing a physical boundary (typically 8–16 managed GPU nodes on your site), who operates which interface, and what evidence exists for an assessment. Pacific maps physical and boundary controls and keeps certification, policy, and people in your program. If you need vendor-versus-vendor pages, use the mothership comparison index — those URLs are not hosted here.
Book the engineering conversation, not a demo reel
When the rule is “this workload is on-prem,” the next step is a scoped engineering call: site, isolation, and evidence. Book 30 minutes with Harper. Do not send program names or controlled details in a form before a human conversation.
From the desk
CMMC vs public cloud: when to evaluate an on-prem GPU pod
A decision guide for teams whose customer just asked where CUI lives. Full versus-pages stay on the mothership.
Evaluate the boundary, then the mothership pages
Read on-prem CMMC pods and, if you still need a versus-page, open pacific.space/comparisons.