IEEE IRI 2014 invited industry talks (I): Managing shared information in multi-tenant service provider applications

Abstract

Service provider applications, for example in the form of Software-as-a-Service are different from traditional enterprise software systems because they need to enable serving multiple customers at a time with a shared infrastructure. While the property of multi-tenancy refers to the isolation of different customers on a shared system, multi-customer support enables a service provider to add value by taking advantage of different customers being (virtually) collocated in the same application. This can be used for efficiency purposes, which is important e.g. to render services based on data or infrastructure of multiple accounts, or analyze operations data from different accounts to gain common insights. This is quite common, e.g., in the case of service management systems such as help desk ticketing in which service provider employees work on problem tickets of different client companies but these tenants are isolated from each other. Alternatively, this also enables a service provider to share curated data that customers can pair with their own sources to gain insights, a typical big data application. This presentation will discuss issues of managing access in this scenario of multi-tenancy with controlled sharing of data and presents an approach to address this problem.