Tenant Isolation

Tenant isolation is one of the foundational topics that every SaaS provider must address. As independent software vendors (ISVs) make the shift toward SaaS and adopt a shared infrastructure model to achieve cost and operational efficiency, they also have to take on the challenge of determining how their multi-tenant environments will ensure that each tenant is prevented from accessing another tenant’s resources. Crossing this boundary in any form would represent a significant and potentially unrecoverable event for a SaaS business.

While the need for tenant isolation is viewed as essential to SaaS providers, the strategies and approaches to achieving this isolation are not universal. There are a wide range of factors that can influence how tenant isolation is realized in any SaaS environment. The domain, compliance, deployment model, and the selection of AWS services all bring their own unique set of considerations to the tenant isolation story.

Regardless of how the isolation is implemented, each SaaS architecture needs to ensure that it has put in place the constructs that are needed to ensure that each tenant’s resources have been effectively isolated.