Maintain Privacy and Control with Single Tenancy

Intro

The shift to SaaS has offered incredible convenience, but it often comes with a trade-off in security and control. For organizations with the most stringent privacy and compliance needs, standard multi-tenant SaaS may not offer them the level of control they need. Material offers the option for a single-tenant SaaS deployment that provides the isolation and transparency of an on-premise solution with the ease and expertise of a managed service.

Problem: The multi-tenant SaaS model forces a compromise

The standard multi-tenant SaaS model processes and stores data on shared infrastructure. While this deployment model is secure and stable for the vast majority of companies, it introduces limitations that are unacceptable for the most risk-averse organizations.

This forces these companies into a difficult compromise:

• Difficulty meeting strict data sovereignty and compliance mandates: For organizations in public sector, defense, and other highly regulated industries, security requirements are often codified into law. Compliance frameworks like CMMC or ITAR go beyond typical best practices, mandating provable physical isolation of data and infrastructure. A standard multi-tenant architecture, where data is logically segregated but shares underlying resources, simply doesn't meet this stringent requirement. This creates an immediate impasse, preventing the adoption of critical security tooling that can’t provide a dedicated, single-tenant environment to satisfy auditors.
• On-prem alternative is too burdensome: To avoid these issues, some organizations turn to on-premise software. But this model swaps one problem for another, creating a massive operational burden for teams to manage updates, patches, and infrastructure uptime.

Solution: The best of both worlds—managed application, controlled infrastructure

Material offers the option for a single-tenant architecture that meets the security and regulatory needs of the most security-conscious customers. 

Here’s how Material solves the problem with our available dedicated single-tenant environment:

• Full transparency and infrastructure access: Because the application runs within a dedicated cloud account, teams get direct access to the underlying infrastructure logs, metrics, and monitoring. Data can be streamed into SIEM and observability tools, giving a unified view of your entire environment.
• Customer-controlled security: This model allows companies to wrap Material’s managed application with their own security controls. Companies can leverage their own encryption keys via KMS, apply custom network policies through VPCs and security groups, and ensure the entire stack meets their specific security standards.
• Fully managed by experts: Companies get all the control of an on-prem deployment without the operational headache. Material’s expert Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team handles all application deployment, maintenance, patching, and 24/7 monitoring, freeing teams to focus on security outcomes.

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