Configuration in ERP SaaS Multi-Tenancy

TL;DR

This paper explores how to implement configurable ERP applications within multi-tenant SaaS environments, addressing challenges of customization, security, and efficiency for multiple customers sharing infrastructure.

Contribution

It presents strategies and architectures for enabling configuration in ERP SaaS applications without impacting other tenants or compromising security.

Findings

Proposes architecture for configurable multi-tenant ERP SaaS

Addresses security and customization challenges in multi-tenancy

Provides guidelines for implementing configuration management

Abstract

Software as a Service (SaaS) becomes in this decade the focus of many enterprises and research. SaaS provides software application as Web based delivery to server many customers. This sharing of infrastructure and application provided by Saas has a great benefit to customers, since it reduces costs, minimizes risks, improves their competitive positioning, as well as seeks out innovative. SaaS application is generally developed with standardized software functionalities to serve as many customers as possible. However many customers ask to change the standardized provided functions according to their specific business needs, and this can be achieve through the configuration and customization provided by the SaaS vendor. Allowing many customers to change software configurations without impacting others customers and with preserving security and efficiency of the provided services, becomes a big challenge to SaaS vendors, who are oblige to design new strategies and architectures. Multi-tenancy (MT) architectures allow multiple customers to be consolidated into the same operational system without changing anything in the vendor source code. In this paper, we will present how the configuration can be done on an ERP web application in a Multi-Tenancy SaaS environment.