Data Sharing in Data-Centric Multi-tenant Software as a Service

Cloud Computing include applications that are delivered as services using internet in the shape of infrastructure, systems or application software (SaaS) hosted at a remote computing facility. SaaS applications are deployed on a shared environment that can be accessed by its users from various client-end software by using Internet. Organizations using SaaS application do not have control over the infrastructure of the environment that is often built using multi-tenant system architecture. Usually data-centric multi-tenant applications provide a common UI for all the tenants or organizations and data of multiple tenants is saved in a single database. Core of these applications revolve around managing organizations data. For many reasons like mergers, joint marketing campaign, moving from pilot to production SaaS instance, we have to migrate data from one tenant to another. Data migration requires a very skilled and time consuming human effort and it results in data duplication. Therefore we propose a middleware for data sharing between different organizations, a design pattern for the implementation of the middleware, and extension to current multi-tenant database designs for SaaS applications which will help in eliminating human effort in data migration and avoiding data duplication. Our results shows that data can be shared between different tenants of a SaaS efficiently without making a significant change in existing architecture of SaaS.