One of the core tenets of SaaS is to be secure. Security spans across many layers from controlling access with IP whitelisting or Private Link, validating access with authentication to validate identity, authorization to assign permissions to users within tenant organizations, auditing to record every activity, tenant isolation to guard against malicious tenants, regulatory requirements from securing third-party services accesses to operational processes to achieve different compliance standards, and so on.
In addition, one of the key security risks is to protect tenant data. Now, we might use authentication and TLS mechanisms to secure data in transit, but it doesn’t address data at rest. If an attacker gains access or an internal employee misuses information, it may seriously impact your users and your business reputation. You may need extra layers of controls for some of the above, depending on the impact on your business. Finally, depending on the domain, your tenant may also need observability from application usage metrics/insights, performance metrics, logging, to notifications.
Each one of them takes time and resources to build and maintain. As an example for authentication, you may start with plain SASL, but you are expected to add SSO, OAuth mechanisms for other systems to securely interact with your service.
To learn more about all the core capabilities that we need to deliver a SaaS offering, see here
To learn more about how users can leverage a SaaS platform like Omnistrate to address many of these challenges, please see here.