About 6 months ago, we launched the first version of a feature called Multitenancy, allowing for customer-specific status updates . Over these 6 months we've been working closely with a handful of enterprise customers and are extremely excited to launch V2 with new functionality and a new name - Access Control.
The Modern Enterprise Infrastructure
Many enterprise software companies have thousands of customers, and with that many customers comes a lot of data that needs to be stored. A common strategy for handling this immense amount of data is to partition the database into several different shards. These shards are housed in separate servers, and are often geographically dispersed. In other cases, enterprise companies will have a smaller number of extremely high value customers or work in a regulated industry, where each customer needs to be partitioned into their own instance or server, often referred to as single-tenant infrastructure.
While application problems can affect an entire customer base, often issues for enterprises are localized to subsets of customers on specific hardware (for example, via shards) or using specific products (for example, AWS EC2 vs. RDS). This segmentation can be extremely frustrating for Directors of Customer Support and Ops when communicating around service interruptions and outages. Simply put, a blunt instrument that tells all of your customers about a localized issue leads to worried, misinformed customers and a surge of support requests.
Access Control tackles this problem head on by allowing you to communicate to specific groups or even individual customers during downtime.
Keep Customers Happy While Cutting Support Costs
Using Access Control, you can now grant permission to your status page on a per customer basis. In the example above, Customer A has access to the Group A Database status, while Customer B has access to the Group B Database status. Both customers have access to the Public API and Global Application Layer statuses.
Partitioning status page access per customer helps both providers and customers in the long run. Customers get an inside look into their specific status with a provider, building trust when the unfortunate reality of downtime arises. Enterprises get peace of mind knowing that customers aren’t receiving errant status updates, while saving thousands of dollars per month on inbound support overhead.
Getting Started
We'd love to see if Access Control can help out with your incident communication. The best way to get started is to request a demo here and we'll follow up to schedule a call!
