Safe Configurable Multitenant SaaS

Sammanfattning: Cloud computing is a significant step forward in computer science. It enables customers to use applications on devices such as telephones, tablets, and computers over the internet. However, in the case of some applications, moving to the cloud can be challenging. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is one example of such an application. ERPs need to be configurable since each company is different and has unique use cases. These configurations could be done by manipulating the logic and execution of programs by extending or modifying existing classes, basically writing customized plugins. The customer or the vendor could easily configure traditional offline single-tenant ERPs. Today, however, having this level of customization in a cloud-based multi-tenant ERP system is not an easy task. Since every customer shares the same application, though isolated from each other, changes made for one customer are made for every customer. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to find one or several answers to the question: how can you enable deep customization in multi-tenant SaaS systems in a secure way? A structured literature study is performed to analyze and investigate different solutions. The results gathered from the literature study showed that three solutions could be adapted: microservices, extensible programming, and static analysis tools. However, based on some requirements, extensible programming was found most suitable for the investigated ERP.