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In one of the other articles on SaaS, Business Applications, SaaS and SMB Market, we proposed that SaaS will be a mass enabler for SMB (small and medium business) market. In order to provide effective SaaS solutions for enabling multi tenant systems, it is imperative that the key issues of data security and privacy are addressed.
Let’s look at different levels of SaaS enablement for business applications. The SaaS solution enables a multi-tenant system that can be used by multiple clients. The solution enables a secure and trusted environment where clients can execute business processes with complete confidence.
The critical aspect of multi-tenancy solution is data security & privacy and application security. In simple terms, it is about data separation and application separation. In this article, we shall focus on data security and privacy.
There are multiple mechanisms which can be used to ensure data separation so that a client does not get access to another client’s data on the same SaaS solution.
i. Database Separation:This solution provides a very high level of data privacy as a separate database is allocated to each customer. This comes at a higher cost due to licensing and operational cost on the SaaS vendor side.
ii. Schema/Table Separation: This solution provides a medium level of data privacy as separate tables are assigned to each customer.
iii. Data Separation:This solution provides the lowest level of data privacy as same tables are used to store customer data.
iv. Data Encryption:Data encryption can be used to provide a very high level of data privacy to customer data. Data encryption can be used with any of the above solutions. Typically data encryption is done using symmetric encryption with algorithms like AES (Advanced Encryption Standard).
One should carefully evaluate application requirements and risk profile to identify the appropriate level of data separation.
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