Tenant Isolation Strategy

Pentagull offers its products through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. A fundamental part of this model is ensuring that each tenant's resources are sufficiently isolated from other tenants so that system integrity is maintained at all times. This includes ensuring both data security and system performance.

Our developers, technical architects and infrastructure teams have worked together to create a SaaS model that offers a secure, scalable, robust and cost-effective platform through which we can deliver our services.

The bridge model of isolation

We utilise an isolation model that is sometimes referred to as the bridge model. It is a hybrid environment that combines both the pool and silo models at different layers of the application stack, and it is this hybrid approach that allows us to provide a high degree of separation while remaining cost effective.

Each tenant receives their own database, storage and application layer. These run under security contexts that are specific to the tenant.

We also provision each tenant with their own HTTPS sites with their own SSL certificates - either provisioned by us or the client. In addition, authentication is configured independently for each tenant, allowing each client to define their own access control policies.

Dealing with noisy neighbours

We employ a number of techniques to ensure that each customer receives a consistent level of performance regardless of the activity of other tenants.

Under normal operating conditions, spare resources are available to be consumed by any combination of tenants in order to respond to increases in demand. However, should resource contention occur, limiting is imposed to prevent certain tenants from using excessive resources at the expense of other tenants.

Our environment features the ability to scale up and down to meet demand as and when required, reducing the likelihood of a service interruption due to unexpected increase in usage.

The amount of memory, CPU and storage consumed by each tenant is constantly monitored, and action is taken if any tenant exceeds their expected thresholds.

Enhanced isolation

If your circumstances require a higher degree of isolation than is provided by our standard SaaS solution we offer a number of enhanced levels of isolation model, all the way to full stack isolation. These isolation models come at increased cost and are not part of any of our standard offerings so please contact us to discuss your requirements.