Regulated Industries

Tensor9 for Regulated Industries

Many enterprises operate in highly regulated industries, such as finance, healthcare, government, and defense. These customers must adhere to strict regulatory requirements around data privacy, security, auditability, and compliance. Regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, FedRAMP, and GDPR often require software vendors to meet stringent controls regarding where data is stored, how it is accessed, and how support workflows are managed.

For software vendors, selling to regulated customers can be a long and costly process due to the need for customized delivery, deployment, and support models. Vendors often face sales delays or lose deals altogether because their traditional SaaS model cannot meet regulatory requirements without significant engineering overhead.

Tensor9 removes these obstacles by enabling software vendors to deliver their product directly into regulated customer environments while maintaining full compliance with regulatory frameworks.

Regulatory Challenges for Vendors

1. Data Residency Requirements
   Regulations like HIPAA and GDPR require sensitive customer data (e.g., PHI, financial records) to remain within specified boundaries, whether geographic or infrastructural.

2. Access Restrictions
   Regulated customers may require software vendors to minimize their access to sensitive systems, restricting observability and traditional SaaS support workflows.

3. Audit and Compliance Reporting
   Vendors must provide detailed, auditable records of their software operations, including deployments, support sessions, and logs, to meet compliance standards.

4. Air-Gapped and On-Prem Needs
   Some regulated industries require fully air-gapped environments or private on-prem deployments with no external connectivity.

How Tensor9 Helps

1. Data Localization and Sovereignty
   Tensor9 allows vendors to deliver their software into customer-controlled environments, including on-prem systems, private clouds, and air-gapped networks. This ensures that customer data never leaves their infrastructure, simplifying compliance with data residency regulations.

2. Privileged Access Control
   Tensor9 enables vendors to support their software using secure, audit-logged, customer-supervised workflows, ensuring vendors cannot access sensitive data without explicit customer approval.

3. Audit and Monitoring
   Tensor9 provides detailed logs of deployments, updates, and support interactions. These logs are stored within the customer’s environment, enabling easy compliance reporting and regulatory audits.

4. Air-Gapped Deployments
   Tensor9 supports fully offline environments, ensuring vendors can deliver and support their software without internet access, using offline update workflows and secure log transfer mechanisms.

Example Scenario

A large financial institution considering a SaaS fraud detection platform faces regulatory hurdles, including GDPR and FedRAMP compliance requirements, which mandate that sensitive customer data must remain entirely within their own on-prem systems. Additionally, the institution must ensure that the SaaS vendor cannot access sensitive data or perform unsupervised support actions.

What Tensor9 Could Enable:
The SaaS vendor can deliver their fraud detection software directly into the financial institution’s secure environment. Tensor9 replaces cloud-managed services with local open-source equivalents (e.g., MinIO for storage, Redis for caching) and provides audit-logged support workflows. This approach allows the SaaS vendor to offer ongoing support without direct access to customer systems or data.

Benefits

1. Faster Sales Cycles: Meeting compliance requirements from the start reduces the time required for legal and security reviews.
2. Increased Market Access: Enables vendors to expand into highly regulated industries, such as financial services, healthcare, and defense.
3. Lower Engineering Overhead: Tensor9 eliminates the need for vendors to build multiple versions of their product to meet regulatory demands.
4. Simplified Compliance: Supports regulatory frameworks such as HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP, and DORA without requiring custom deployments.

Summary