Private SaaS is a variation of SaaS where the provider runs the software within the customer’s network but takes the responsibility for managing and securing it. The provider’s Private-SaaS framework takes care of reliability, availability, upgrades and Day 2 operations. The private SaaS mode splits the control plane and the data plane, allowing customer data to remain within their network.
Why do we need Private SaaS?
While SaaS is very attractive for a large number of application categories, there are some categories and use cases where it is less than ideal. For example, categories like developer tools, DataOps tools, ML Ops tools. These tools often touch an organization’s source code – which might be full of proprietary algorithms – and may need to interact with their production systems. This especially applies to industries like FinTech, Healthcare, Government and various others that deal with sensitive user data. In those cases, organizations take advantage of open source variants of tools and self-host them within their network perimeter. This is evident in the popularity of tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Jenkins, Argo, Kubeflow etc.
While self-hosting tools is a great way to achieve flexibility and data residency, it can quickly become a scalability, reliability and security challenge. Organizations end up spending a lot of engineering resources in just managing these tools. This is where Private SaaS comes in. It bridges the gap between traditional SaaS and self-hosting and brings the benefits of SaaS while providing great data residency, data governance and compliance.
Benefits of Private SaaS
Key benefits of Private SaaS,
-
- Fully managed by the provider: The provider takes care of deployment, configuration, reliability, security, DR, upgrades etc.
- Data residency and governance: Since data lives within the organizations network perimeter, organizations have control over where to keep the data and on how long to retain it.
- Compliance: Achieving compliance standards like SOC2, HIPAA and GDPR becomes much easier as data is with the organization’s governance.
- Data transfer costs: For tools dealing with a lot of data (Ex: log management, data pipelines), Private SaaS can eliminate quite a lot of data transfer costs.
What are the differences between SaaS, Self-Hosting and Private SaaS?
| SaaS | Self Hosted | Private SaaS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Managed by |
Provider |
Self |
Provider |
| Reliability |
High |
Low |
High |
| Security hardening |
High |
Low |
High |
| Operational overhead |
Low |
High |
Medium |
| Time to value |
Quick |
Slow |
Quick |
| Data residency |
Not Available |
Full Control |
Full Control |
| Data governance |
Not Available |
Full Control |
Full Control |
| Compliance |
High dependency on the |
No external dependency |
Some dependency on the |
| Data transfer costs |
High |
Low |
Low |
Future of Private SaaS
This is an emerging method of delivery and needs sophisticated distributed deployment capabilities for the provider to optimally deliver software. The industry is seeing a strong demand from end-users for this type of product. With the increase in data residency and data compliance requirements, we will see a surge in the general demand for the private SaaS model of delivering software in the next five years
