Multi-tenanted document editing for security and savings
Running a SaaS platform could be compared to a pizza restaurant on a busy Friday night. Not packets of data flying over the internet, but waiters and waitresses hustling in and out. Not load balancers scaling up and down, but chefs working the kitchen, and of course in the middle of it all not a powerful server, but a blazing pizza oven!
At this point however, the comparisons end. In the interest of data security, many SaaS providers seek to completely isolate each customer’s data by running dedicated servers for each client. Yet no matter how strong your feelings are about keeping pineapple off of pizzas, we’ve yet to find a pizzeria with an oven for each order. But what if there was a way for software hosts to share server power between multiple customers? Welcome to the world of multi-tenancy, where one server serves multiple customers – without letting their toppings mix.
What is Multi-tenancy?
For a SaaS provider, spinning up dedicated servers for each tenant is like buying a new oven for every pizza. Sure, it works, but it’s costly, inefficient, and clogs up your kitchen (data centre). Instead with multi-tenancy, multiple customers and businesses share the same server infrastructure and space, leading to significant savings for the provider. However this raises the critical question – How do you cook multiple pizzas simultaneously without compromising the security of each one?
Stateless Pizza Boxes
Collabora Online operates in containers, with each document isolated from the next in its own highly secure “jail”. This not only safeguards one organisation’s documents from another, but also prevents access within an organisation by users without the correct permissions – something servers segregated by organisation cannot guarantee.
But not only containerised, Collabora Online in fact uses stateless containers. This means user data isn’t actually stored within the container itself, and the container isn’t permanent. Instead, data required by containers is stored externally in a database or file system. In this way, each tenant is processed in its own isolated and unique environment. Being processed on volatile RAM, you can think of stateless containers like serving pizzas in single-use boxes, that are thrown away after each use. There’s no need to do any washing up, and no risk of any data being left behind for the next customer.
And thanks to our recently developed Collabora Online Controller, you have the best head chef, able to scale up, and scale down your system usage as needed, even when serving 100,000+ customers.
Remote Ovens?
But multi-tenancy brings even more advantages than savings on power usage, hardware, and real estate/rental costs. With centralised document editing, you don’t need to maintain multiple instances of Collabora Online. Instead, it’s easy to remotely configure your document editing, and with a single edit, can update your Collabora Online for all of your tenants. Fonts, templates, system updates are all controlled from one location, with a single JSON file. There is no need to update the xml file in each location. This further compounds the efficiency savings, and makes life easy for your sysadmins.
A Recipe for Success
Collabora Online’s multi-tenant, stateless architecture delivers the best of both worlds – the efficiency of shared resources and the security of complete isolation. With our simple solution, you get serious savings.
Hungry to learn more? Get in touch and let us serve up the perfect solution for you.
