Several months ago, the internet was abuzz with the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying, “SaaS is dead.”
The conversation started with a question from Bill Gurley about whether Satya was worried that newer startups are building applications with an AI-first approach, which could obfuscate traditional infrastructure like Excel or CRM. Here is Satya’s response:
Having been involved in the development of four commercial SaaS products at my previous company, I've come to realize the multitude of complexities that arise compared to typical consumer products. Among these complexities, one prominent area lies in the intricate realm of permission control and access policies.
Almost all the SaaS now is collaborative, from the originator Salesforce to the newly emerging one like Notion. To make it collaborative, technically, we need to build the foundation to support tenant isolation with an access control policy. A classic challenge here is striking a balance between app security and dev productivity. ZenStack’s access policy provides an innovative way to achieve that balance using the declarative schema.
Collaboration has become crucial in the contemporary business landscape. This is due to the mounting complexity of the challenges we face, as well as the prevalence of remote work. Businesses are realizing that effective collaboration is the key to success, as it promotes teamwork, enhances productivity, and leads to better outcomes.
Soft delete is a common requirement for SaaS products. But the current solution in Prisma has certain issues. Let's see how ZenStack solves it.
Almost all the SaaS now is collaborative, from the originator Salesforce to the newly emerging one like Notion. To make it collaborative, technically, we need to build the foundation to support tenant isolation with an access control policy. A classic challenge here is striking a balance between app security and dev productivity.
This tutorial demonstrates how to build a SaaS product using Next.js and ZenStack and the benefit of using a data model as the single source of truth to handle access control.