When large enterprises stumbled into multi-tenant cloud environments a decade ago, they learned a hard lesson: compliance can’t be outsourced. Misconfigured S3 buckets, cross-border data breaches, and opaque vendor SLAs turned into billion-dollar fines and reputational wipeouts. Now SMEs are entering the same arena; but with tighter budgets, fewer lawyers, and regulators who no longer grade on a curve, it’s not if but when SMEs adopting SaaS will encounter at least one compliance gap due to vendor oversight failures.
Avoid Playing Compliance Roulette
Left unchecked, compliance gaps can expose SMEs to fines (GDPR’s €20M, PIPL’s $7.6M), loss of key clients who demand compliance guarantees, and operational downtime during audits. Worse yet, SMEs are often a soft entry point for attackers seeking access to enterprise supply chains. This means that although multi-tenancy brings scale, SMEs that lack proactive governance face large, shared risks. …