Why financial services choose single-tenant SaaS

Walk into any major financial institution and you'll see the contradiction immediately. Past the armed guards, through the biometric scanners, beyond the reinforced walls and multiple security checkpoints, you'll find developers building the algorithms that power global finance — on shared infrastructure alongside millions of strangers.

The software powering today's financial institutions is anything but ordinary. It includes credit risk models that protect billions in assets, payment processing algorithms handling millions of transactions, customer intelligence platforms that drive business strategy, and regulatory systems ensuring operational compliance — all powered by source code that serves as both operational core and strategic asset.

When shared infrastructure becomes systemic risk

The rise of software-as-a-service platforms has created an uncomfortable reality for financial institutions. Every shared tenant becomes an unmanaged third-party risk, turning platform-wide incidents into industry-wide disruptions. This is the exact kind of concentration risk drawing increasing attention from regulators.

JPMorgan Chase's Chief Information Security Officer Patrick Opet recently issued a stark warning to the industry in an open letter to third-party suppliers. He highlighted how SaaS adoption "is creating a substantial vulnerability that is weakening the global economic system" by embedding "concentration risk into global critical infrastructure." The letter emphasizes that "an attack on one major SaaS or PaaS provider can immediately ripple through its customers,” creating exactly the systemic risk that multi-tenant cloud platforms for source code management, CI builds, CD deployments, and security scanning introduce.

Consider the regulatory complexity this creates. In shared environments, your compliance posture becomes hostage to potential incidents impacting other tenants as well as the concentration risks of large attack surface providers. A misconfiguration affecting any organization on the platform can trigger wider impact across the entire ecosystem.

Data sovereignty challenges compound this risk. Shared platforms distribute workloads across multiple regions and jurisdictions, often without granular control over where your source code executes. For institutions operating under strict regulatory requirements, this geographic distribution can create compliance gaps that are difficult to remediate.

Then there's the amplification effect. Every shared tenant effectively becomes an indirect third-party risk to your operations. Their vulnerabilities increase your attack surface. Their incidents can impact your availability. Their compromises can affect your environment.

Purpose-built for what matters most

GitLab recognizes that your source code deserves the same security posture as your most sensitive customer data. Rather than forcing you to choose between cloud-scale efficiency and enterprise-grade security, GitLab delivers both through GitLab Dedicated, purpose-built infrastructure that maintains complete isolation.

Your development workflows, source code repositories, and CI/CD pipelines run in an environment exclusively dedicated to your organization. The hosted runners for GitLab Dedicated exemplify this approach. These runners connect securely to your data center through outbound private links, allowing access to your private services without exposing any traffic to the public internet. The auto-scaling architecture provides the performance you need, without compromising security or control.

Rethinking control

For financial institutions, minimizing shared risk is only part of the equation — true resilience requires precise control over how systems operate, scale, and comply with regulatory frameworks. GitLab Dedicated enables comprehensive data sovereignty through multiple layers of customer control. You maintain complete authority over encryption keys through bring-your-own-key (BYOK) capabilities, ensuring that sensitive source code and configuration data remains accessible only to your organization. Even GitLab cannot access your encrypted data without your keys.

Data residency becomes a choice rather than a constraint. You select your preferred AWS region to meet regulatory requirements and organizational data governance policies, maintaining full control over where your sensitive source code and intellectual property are stored.

This control extends to compliance frameworks that financial institutions require. The platform provides comprehensive audit trails and logging capabilities that support compliance efforts for financial services regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and GLBA Safeguards Rule.

When compliance questions arise, you work directly with GitLab's dedicated support team — experienced professionals who understand the regulatory challenges that organizations in highly regulated industries face.

Operational excellence without operational overhead

GitLab Dedicated maintains high availability with built-in disaster recovery, ensuring your development operations remain resilient even during infrastructure failures. The dedicated resources scale with your organization's needs without the performance variability that shared environments introduce.

The zero-maintenance approach to CI/CD infrastructure eliminates a significant operational burden. Your teams focus on development while GitLab manages the underlying infrastructure, auto-scaling, and maintenance — including rapid security patching to protect your critical intellectual property from emerging threats. This operational efficiency doesn't come at the cost of security: the dedicated infrastructure provides enterprise-grade controls while delivering cloud-scale performance.

The competitive reality

While some institutions debate infrastructure strategies, industry leaders are taking decisive action. NatWest Group, one of the UK's largest financial institutions, chose GitLab Dedicated to transform their engineering capabilities:

"NatWest Group is adopting GitLab Dedicated to enable our engineers to use a common cloud engineering platform; delivering new customer outcomes rapidly, frequently and securely with high quality, automated testing, on demand infrastructure and straight-through deployment. This will significantly enhance collaboration, improve developer productivity and unleash creativity via a 'single-pane-of-glass' for software development."

Adam Leggett, Platform Lead - Engineering Platforms, NatWest

The strategic choice

The most successful financial institutions face a unique challenge: They have the most to lose from shared infrastructure risks, but also the resources to architect better solutions.

The question that separates industry leaders from followers: Will you accept shared infrastructure risks as the price of digital transformation, or will you invest in infrastructure that treats your source code with the strategic importance it deserves?

Your trading algorithms aren't shared. Your risk models aren't shared. Your customer data isn't shared.

Why is your development platform shared?

Ready to treat your source code like the strategic asset it is? Let’s chat about how GitLab Dedicated provides the security, compliance, and performance that financial institutions demand — without the compromises of shared infrastructure.