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Industries — SaaS & technologyGrow upmarket without the platform holding you back.
The two things that stall Australian SaaS platforms moving into enterprise are almost always the same: tenant isolation they cannot evidence, and unit economics they cannot see.
Pick the model deliberately, then be able to prove it
Every isolation model is defensible. What is not defensible is discovering in an enterprise security review that nobody chose one — the estate simply grew into whatever it is now.
| Model | Isolation strength | Cost efficiency | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silo — account per tenant | Strongest | Lowest | Few, large, regulated tenants who will pay for it and ask about it |
| Bridge — shared compute, isolated data | Strong | Moderate | Most B2B platforms moving upmarket; the common landing point |
| Pool — shared everything, row-level | Weakest | Highest | High-volume, low-value tenants; SMB self-serve tiers |
| Mixed | Varies by tier | Varies | Deliberately: pooled self-serve, siloed enterprise. Very common and entirely legitimate |
Evidencing isolation
IAM policy conditions on tenant context, per-tenant KMS keys where the tier justifies it, and automated tests that attempt cross-tenant access on every deploy.
Noisy neighbour
Per-tenant rate limiting and quota enforcement, so one customer's bad integration does not become everyone's incident — and your status page stays honest.
Tenant lifecycle
Onboarding, suspension, export and deletion as automated, tested operations. Deletion in particular gets asked about in every enterprise review.
Cost per tenant, not cost per month
Aggregate AWS spend tells you almost nothing useful about a SaaS business. Cost to serve per tenant, per tier and per feature tells you which customers are unprofitable, which plans are mispriced, and which feature is quietly consuming your gross margin.
- Tenant context propagated to tags, or inferred where pooled resources make that impossible
- Shared-infrastructure cost allocated on a defensible key, agreed with finance
- Cost per tenant surfaced to product and sales, not only to engineering
- Margin impact modelled before a new plan or enterprise commitment is priced
- Anomaly alerts when a single tenant's cost profile changes sharply
A pattern we see repeatedly
The largest logo is the least profitable. It negotiated hard on price, then turned out to be the heaviest user of the most expensive feature — usually reporting, exports or an integration that polls.
Nobody knows until cost is attributed per tenant. Once it is, the conversation changes from "reduce AWS spend" to "reprice this tier, cache that endpoint, and put a quota on the export API" — which is a far more productive conversation to have with a product team.
The questionnaire that arrives with your biggest deal
At some revenue point every Australian SaaS platform meets a 200-question security review, a SOC 2 requirement, or a procurement team asking for a penetration test report and an exit plan. It usually arrives with a deal date attached.
- Gap assessment against SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria or ISO 27001 Annex A
- Guardrails and control implementation — preventive first, then detective
- Continuous evidence collection, so the next review is a download not a project
- A standing response pack: diagrams, sub-processors, IR plan, insurance, screening
- Auditor and assessor liaison, with us in the room for technical questions
Release safety
Multi-tenant platforms cannot take a maintenance window and cannot roll a bad release back to one customer. Blue/green and canary with automated rollback on SLO breach is not sophistication here — it is the minimum viable arrangement, and we build it as such.
Growth-shaped commitments
Fast-growing platforms are the worst candidates for aggressive three-year commitments. We ladder coverage so you capture the discount without betting on a growth curve nobody can forecast — and revisit it quarterly.
Get ahead of the enterprise review
Doing this before a deal depends on it is dramatically cheaper than doing it with a close date in the calendar.