Leveraging NoSQL for Scalable and Dynamic Data Encryption in Multi-tenant SaaS

Abstract

In the context of multi-tenant SaaS applications, data confidentiality support is increasingly being offered from within the application layer instead of the database layer or the storage layer to accommodate continuously changing requirements of multiple tenants. Application-level data management middleware platforms are becoming increasingly compelling for dealing with the complexity of a multi-cloud or a federated cloud storage architecture as well as multi-tenant SaaS applications.However, these platforms typically support traditional data mapping strategies that are created under the assumption of a fixed and rigorous database schema. Thus, mapping data objects while supporting varying data confidentiality requirements, therefore, leads to fragmentation of data over distributed storage nodes. This introduces significant performance overhead at the level of individual database transactions (e.g., CRUD transactions) and negatively affects the overall scalability.To address these challenges, we present a dedicated data mapping strategy that leverages the data schema flexibility of columnar NoSQL databases to accomplish dynamic and fine-grained data encryption in a more efficient and scalable manner. We validate these solutions in the context of an industrial multi-tenant SaaS application and conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation. The results confirm that the proposed data mapping strategy indeed yields scalability and performance improvements.