Towards scalable and dynamic data encryption for multi-tenant SaaS

Application-level data management middleware solutions are becoming increasingly compelling to deal with the complexity of a multi-cloud or federated cloud storage and multitenant storage architecture. However, these systems typically support traditional data mapping strategies that are created under the assumption of a fixed and rigorous database schema, and mapping data objects while supporting varying data condentiality requirements therefore leads to fragmentation of data over distributed storage nodes. This introduces performance overhead at the level of individual database transactions and negatively affects the overall scalability. This paper discusses these challenges and highlights the potential of leveraging the data schema flexibility of NoSQL databases to accomplish dynamic and fine-grained data encryption in a more efficient and scalable manner. We illustrate these ideas in the context of an industrial multi-tenant SaaS application.status: publishe