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Comment by ledgerdev | Hacker News Reader

Are they data sensitive in terms of trusting your saas to survive and wanting export/backups? Or data sensitive in terms of not trusting the security of your saas to secure certain pieces of sensitive data?

If it's the second, one idea I have considered building is a proxy operated by customer that replaces sensitive data with a token and then passes it onto your systems. Any responses that need to display/reveal the data can then have the sensitive data swapped back in based on the permissions of the user making the request. This puts the sensitive data fully in control of the proxy and it never touches the saas app.

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Thank you! Data-sensitive in terms of the enterprise company not trusting the security of any SaaS app, even if they are Soc-2 compliant. They want the peace of mind that the data is on their side, but still doesn’t want to self-host it.

Another option might be a multi-tenant compute/data architecture where everyone is NOT run on the same compute/database, and instead is in a serverless single tenant architecture in different cloud accounts.

The multi-tenant part of your saas would amount to pushing regular automated updates to individual cloud accounts each with it's own serverless compute/data infra. This should make the core app simpler to build, and push complexity of multi-tenant into systems to manage the apps. Also you could get geo benefits by putting compute/data closer to where it's used. With serverless it should be more cost competitive than the days of operating actual servers.

Depending on your market focus and potential of less demanding customers, it also might make more sense to just avoid these large "semi-custom" customers which will no doubt be very time consuming and need many special features that no one else cares about. If you spend time building those customizations out, you are then stuck managing them after said large customer leaves. I have seen this happen and am wary of any single large customer feature "demands".

Very well said. It is for sure a time suck away from building core features/functionality.

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