Since launching on YC, we’ve gotten a lot of questions surrounding what Fortress does. In fact, here is one of my friends trying to understand what we do by putting our Launch YC post in ChatGPT:
This is a great summary, thanks AI!
In this blog, my goal is to expand on this explanation and simplify it down so that non-technical readers can understand why Fortress exists.
What is ‘customer data’ for SaaS companies and how is it changing:
A SaaS company, or ‘software-as-a-service,’ delivers software applications over the internet as a service. Instead of buying and installing software on individual computers, buyers subscribe to a SaaS application, which they can access through a web browser. This model allows for easier updates, scalability, and access from anywhere with an internet connection.
When a business makes a purchase from a SaaS vendor, they usually have to give up some of their internal data to the SaaS vendor for a service to be done.
Examples:
- Salesforce stores their customers’ sales data and marketing campaign details to help give them analytics to close more sales
- HubSpot stores their customers’ interaction histories, and marketing metrics to automate and optimize their inbound marketing strategies.
- Zendesk stores their customers’ support tickets, communication logs, and service request details to manage and resolve customer issues efficiently.
Due to the nature of AI applications being able to automate entire workflows that were previously internal, companies now give up more of their organizational data than before to 3rd party SaaS companies. For example, a company buying an AI workflow SaaS to automate insurance filling is giving away employee Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that would never have been exposed to outside third parties pre-AI.
As a result, buyers of SaaS products are paying more attention to how their data is stored in a 3rd party SaaS platform. Often this leads to them wanting more data isolation.
What Is Data Isolation?
Data isolation for SaaS companies is how one customer’s data is stored, relative to another. For example, one of the more popular solutions for SaaS companies is to just store all of their customers’ data in a shared table (you can think of this as storing all of the customer data in a excel sheet). While this is easy, cheap, and can be made secure with encryption, larger customers want their data to be more isolated, often in their own database instance (you can think of this as a completely separate computer).
Data isolation is important for three main reasons:
- Preventing Data Leaks: It ensures that one customer cannot accidentally or maliciously access another customer’s data.
- Avoiding Developer Mistakes: It minimizes the risk of developers unintentionally exposing one customer’s data to another.
- Limiting the Impact of Breaches: If one customer’s data is compromised, data isolation ensures that other customers' data remains safe.
SaaS services often have to deal with different levels of data isolation: for some of their customers, it is cheaper and simpler to just store data all in one place while for their bigger customers, they are required to store that data in an isolated environment. As a result of the rise of AI-based SaaS and increased data governance regulations such as GDPR, more SaaS companies have to deal with storing their customer’s data in separate environments.
This creates a few problems for the SaaS developer:
- Data is stored in different environments: developers must create a system to know where a tenant’s data is stored, how to consistently read and write from it, and safely connect to the database.
- Managing many database environments is tedious: For example, if they want to make a change to all of their database environments, they often have to go to each individual one and make sure that the change doesn’t make any breaking edits.
- Provisioning a new database instances is complex: Depending on your database provider, spinning up and initializing a new database instance for a customer is a long process.
How Fortress makes data isolation simple.
Fortress is an orchestration layer on top of databases.
- Single interface: Fortress provides SaaS companies with a single interface to interact with all of these different databases under the hood. For the SaaS, all they need to do is input the customer_id and Fortress will be able to route it to the right database, regardless if it is shared by multiple customers or if it is dedicated to just one.
- Grouped migrations: Fortress provides a secure solution to group databases together so that changes can be made to groups of databases simultaneously. This can be used to handle schema version control across many tenants.
- Automated provisioning of dedicated databases: Fortress automates the process of spinning up new database instances for customers that demand it, allowing you to do it with simple line of code.
Our goal is provide a secure and simple solution to allow SaaS companies to handle their customer’s data in a responsible way without having to change much of their code.
If you are curious to learn more about what we do and how we can help you close more enterprise clients with just a few changes to your code, schedule a call with our founders!