Isolating everyone’s data using BYOK in a multi-tenant SaaS
Presented by:
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Billy VanCannon
Billy VanCannon has over 15 years of experience in cybersecurity. This includes network and software security, public-key infrastructure, and identity and access management. He is currently the Director of Product Management at Baffle, where we work to make encryption easy. Billy has an BS in electrical engineering, an MBA at Northwestern's Kellogg school of management and is CISSP certified.
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Min-Hank Ho
Min-Hank Ho leads the Product Management team at Baffle. Previously, he led development of the Advanced Security Option for the Oracle database and was one of the original engineer for Transparent Data Encryption.
No video of the event yet, sorry!
The popularity of PostgreSQL makes it the prime candidate to be the database for a multi-tenant SaaS. But, with multi-tenancy, there are 2 fundamental issues:
- How do you make sure that the tenant’s data is isolated from each other so that a tenant’s data doesn’t get exposed to other tenants? Letting a tenant see another tenant’s data would be considered a data breach.
- How do you make sure that the tenant has control over their data in a third-party SaaS environment?
Logical databases is a capability supported by Postgres for multi-tenancy. But, there are infrastructure and database inefficiencies with this model. So some SaaS providers use a single database with co-mingled tenant data.
In both models (logical databases or a co-mingled database), there is a need to cryptographically isolate each tenant’s data from other tenants. In addition to data isolation, encrypting a tenant’s data with their own keys lets tenants take control of their data, even though it resides in a third-party SaaS environment.
Database-level encryption (for logical databases) or Row-level encryption (for co-mingled databases) combined with BYOK/HYOK (sometimes called Multi-tenant BYOK/HYOK) keeps each tenant’s data separate and gives each tenant full control over their data. Tenants can also enable/disable their keys so that they have full control of data access, all with centralized management and policy definition for keys.
In this talk on using PostgreSQL in a multi-tenant SaaS, you will learn how to: - Compartmentalize each tenant’s data at the row or logical database level - Use data isolation to meet requirements for geographic isolation/data sovereignty - Easily implement multi-tenant BYOK, without any application changes
- Date:
- 2025 March 21 13:30 EDT
- Duration:
- 50 min
- Room:
- Space Coast 1&2
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference 2025
- Language:
- Track:
- Ops
- Difficulty:
- Medium