You’ve built a fantastic SaaS application. Your CRM works perfectly. Your HR software processes thousands of employee records. Your financial platform handles millions in transactions. Your workflow system keeps teams aligned across continents.

But here’s the problem nobody talks about: each of these applications is storing the same customer and employee data independently.

Sophie’s profile lives in your CRM. Her emergency contact information is duplicated in your HR system. Her phone number is stored in your communications platform. Her email address exists in your financial app. Her profile picture is saved separately in your workflow management tool.

This isn’t just messy. It’s dangerous. It’s expensive. And it’s keeping you from focusing on what you actually want to build.

The Hidden Cost of Data Duplication

Most growing companies don’t realise how much liability they’re carrying until it’s too late. When you store the same customer or employee information across multiple systems, you’ve essentially created multiple targets for attackers.

A data breach doesn’t just mean losing data once; it means losing it ten times over if that person’s information exists in ten different applications.

The numbers are sobering. The average cost of a data breach in 2025 has reached $4.88 million per incident—a 10% increase from the previous year. And if your company stores customer data across multiple systems and environments, the costs climb even higher. Breaches involving data spread across multiple environments average $5.05 million, compared to those kept primarily on-premises at $4.01 million.

“Beyond the financial hit, there’s the customer trust factor. When you experience a data breach, you have to notify customers. You have to explain that their information was exposed. You have to implement credit monitoring. You have to restore damaged relationships.”

58% of customers opt out of mailing lists after a breach. 60% reject any future data-for-download exchanges. 75% avoid signing up for new services from companies that have had privacy incidents. 80% abandon demo forms citing data privacy concerns.

One breach doesn’t just cost millions in immediate response. It costs you customer lifetime value, market reputation, and future growth potential.

The Compliance Nightmare That Never Ends

If data duplication were just a security issue, that would be bad enough. But modern privacy regulations make it exponentially worse.

GDPR, Australia’s Privacy Act, and countless other regulations all require the same thing: you must know where customer data lives, who has access to it, and how you’re protecting it. Auditors want to see your data inventory. Regulators want proof that you’re minimising data collection to only what’s necessary. Customers want to know they can request deletion and have it actually happen.

When Sophie’s information exists in five different databases, fulfilling a data deletion request becomes a nightmare. Did you delete it from the CRM? What about the HR system? The communications app? The financial records? The workflow tool? If you miss one, you’re not compliant. You’re in violation.

Compliance officers lose sleep over this. “We have a data privacy incident,” they tell their CEO, “because we discovered customer information in a system we forgot we had.“

Australia’s recent Privacy Act reforms, effective June 2025, have raised the bar significantly. Businesses now face stricter data security standards, faster breach notification requirements, and the introduction of a statutory tort for serious privacy invasions. The Australian Information Commissioner has been given stronger enforcement powers, meaning penalties for non-compliance are now more severe than ever.

For SaaS companies operating across borders, this is a compliance minefield. Different rules in different countries. Different definitions of what constitutes personal information. Different requirements for how long you can retain data.

Why Your Development Team Is Frustrated

Here’s something that rarely gets discussed at board meetings: your engineers are frustrated.

Every time your company adds a new SaaS tool—a new communications platform, a new analytics engine, a new financial system—your development team has to figure out how to integrate it with existing systems. They have to map data fields. They have to build connectors. They have to maintain those connectors as software versions change.

If you have 10 SaaS applications, you’re not just running 10 systems. You’re running potentially 45 different integrations (that’s the number of possible connections between 10 systems). And each integration is a potential point of failure. Each integration requires ongoing maintenance.

More importantly, each integration means more places where customer data has to be copied, transformed, and transmitted. Each copy is another security risk. Each transformation is another place where data quality can degrade.

Your CRM team wants to focus on building better customer segmentation and predictive analytics. They shouldn’t be spending development cycles managing data synchronization with the HR system.

Your HR team wants to build better employee experience tools. They shouldn’t be spending engineering resources making sure employee records sync correctly with the communications platform.

This is where your competitive advantage gets lost—not in the product features you fail to build, but in the infrastructure work that consumes your engineering resources.

The Ensto Approach: Applications Over Information

What if your applications didn’t have to store customer data at all?

What if your CRM focused entirely on managing customer relationships and closing deals—without worrying about where customer profile information actually lives?

What if your HR system could handle employee workflows, performance reviews, and compensation management—without maintaining duplicate copies of employee contact information?

What if your financial application could process transactions and generate reports—without storing personally identifiable information (PII)?

This is the concept behind Ensto’s “Applications Over Information” philosophy.

Instead of each application independently storing customer and employee data, Ensto IdentityAI acts as a dedicated identity platform that secures, manages, and controls all identity-related information. Your applications tell Ensto what to do with customer information—authenticate, update, or communicate—without ever touching or storing the data themselves.

How It Works in Practice

Imagine Sophie is a customer. She creates a profile in your system. Her information—name, email, phone number, address, payment method, preferences—goes into Ensto. Your applications don’t store Sophie’s information. They store references to Sophie and the specific data they need to perform their function.

1. When your CRM needs to send Sophie a marketing email, it asks Ensto to send email. Ensto does it on behalf of the CRM. The CRM never stores that email address.
2. When your customer service system needs to pull up Sophie’s account history, it requests Sophie’s identity token from Ensto. That token proves Sophie is who she says she is without actually containing her personal information.
3. When Sophie updates her phone number, she makes that change in one place—Ensto’s identity platform. Not in ten different systems. Not by waiting for systems to sync. ONCE!.
4. When Sophie requests that her information be deleted under privacy regulations, deletion happens once. Not across multiple systems. Not with the risk that one system gets missed. ONCE!.

The Security Advantage: FED Architecture

Ensto uses a patent‑pending FED architecture that converts sensitive data into meaningless chunks and relies on an IdentityAI engine to securely store, resolve, and reassemble it at scale when applications need it, without exposing the underlying information to individual systems or integrations.

Traditional identity systems keep customer information in a single database, creating a clear point of compromise, whereas Ensto’s approach eliminates useful data from application layers by default and only materialises the minimum required attributes just‑in‑time through IdentityAI orchestration.

By transforming data into context‑free chunks and governing retrieval with IdentityAI, Ensto reduces breach impact, improves compliance outcomes, and sustains enterprise performance as volumes grow and new apps are added to your stack.

This architectural approach fundamentally changes the math of security. When a data breach occurs, the damage is dramatically reduced. An attacker might successfully compromise a database and extract encrypted fragments. Those fragments have minimal value without the encryption keys and the ability to recombine them across distributed systems.

In security terminology, Ensto cuts the potential breach impact by up to 70%. That’s not a marketing claim. That’s the result of making data unintelligible to attackers, even when they successfully compromise systems.

Managing Identity Without Managing Risk

Ensto handles more than just profile information. It manages the full ecosystem of identity-related activities that your applications need but shouldn’t have to worry about.

Authentication. When users need to prove who they are, Ensto handles it. Not your CRM. Not your HR system. Ensto has the security infrastructure to manage authentication securely.

Communications. Sending emails, text messages, and push notifications tied to user identity? Ensto handles that. Your applications don’t store email addresses or phone numbers. They request that Ensto send a message to a specific identity.

Profile management. When customers or employees update their information—change their address, update their phone number, modify their preferences—those updates happen in Ensto’s identity platform. All your applications immediately have access to current information without needing to sync across multiple systems.

Authorisation and access control. Who should have access to what? Ensto manages those permissions. Your CRM doesn’t have to figure out which employees can see customer data. Ensto enforces it.

The result is that your applications can focus on what they do best. Your CRM focuses on customer relationships. Your HR system focuses on talent management. Your financial platform focuses on transactions. Your workflow system focuses on process optimization.

And none of them have to carry the burden of managing customer data, which means none of them are targets for the majority of data breaches.

Integration That Actually Works

Most SaaS companies approach integration as a technical problem. “How do we connect System A to System B?”

But integration is really a business problem. It’s about: How much engineering effort is required? How long does it take to implement? How fragile are the connections? How much ongoing maintenance is needed? How much time is the team spending on infrastructure rather than product innovation?

Ensto’s integration model is designed to be pragmatic.

Your CRM already exists. You’re not replacing it. You’re not rebuilding it. Ensto integrates with your existing CRM to handle identity and authentication functions. Your CRM continues doing what it does well, but now it’s freed from managing customer data.

Same with your HR system. Same with your communications platform. Same with your financial application.

Rather than building custom integrations between every application pair, you build a single connection to Ensto. Each application connects to Ensto using standard APIs. Ensto becomes the hub through which all identity-related data flows.

This is radically simpler than the integration mess most enterprises face. It also means that when you add a new SaaS tool next year—a new analytics platform, a new marketing automation system, a new payment processor—you don’t have to build integrations to ten existing systems. You connect the new tool to Ensto. Done.

Your stack becomes more scalable, more maintainable, and more secure.

Compliance Becomes Achievable

Compliance sounds abstract until you’re in an audit.

Then it becomes very concrete. You need to prove:

• Where personal data is stored. With Ensto, it’s in one place: the identity platform.
• Who has access. Ensto provides comprehensive access controls and logging.
• How it’s protected. Fragmentation, encryption, and distribution provide defense-in-depth security.
• How you respond to data access requests. When a customer requests access to their data, you retrieve it from Ensto.
• How you handle deletion requests. When someone requests deletion, you delete from Ensto.
• What your data retention policies are. You maintain a single retention policy in Ensto rather than managing different policies across multiple systems.

Ensto is built from the ground up to support GDPR compliance, Australia’s Privacy Act requirements, and similar privacy regulations worldwide. Your organization gets to be “compliance ready” rather than constantly scrambling to meet new requirements across multiple systems.

This isn’t theoretical. Compliance officers report a 30-40% reduction in audit time when personal data is centralized in a purpose-built identity platform rather than scattered across ten applications.

More importantly, compliance failures become much less likely. The risk of missing a data subject’s deletion request because it got lost in System C while successfully processing in Systems A and B? That disappears.

The Customer Trust Multiplier

Here’s what doesn’t always appear in security metrics: customer trust.

When you experience a data breach at a company and that company handles it poorly—slow notification, unclear about what happened, unclear about what they’re doing to fix it—you feel violated. You question whether you want to do business with them anymore.

When you experience a data breach at a company and that company has clearly thought about preventing it, has clear communication about what happened, has a compelling story about how their architecture prevented worse damage, and demonstrates competent leadership? You’re much more likely to stick around.

With Ensto’s “Applications Over Information” architecture, you have a compelling story to tell customers.

“Your personal information isn’t stored in our CRM. It’s not in our HR system. It’s not in any of our applications. It’s stored in a dedicated identity platform with enterprise-grade security architecture designed specifically to protect it. It’s fragmented, encrypted, and distributed across multiple secure locations. Even in the event of a breach—which we work hard to prevent but acknowledge is always possible—the damage would be substantially limited because attackers wouldn’t find complete, usable data.”

Customers recognize this as legitimate security thinking. It’s not just security theater. It’s architecture.

The result: improved sign-up conversions and customer loyalty. Research shows that when customers understand that their data is being managed securely, they’re more confident in providing the information your business needs to serve them well.

Reducing Complexity, Not Adding It

Some enterprises look at Ensto and worry: “Isn’t this adding another system to manage? Won’t that create more complexity?”

Actually, it’s the opposite.

Before Ensto, here’s what you’re managing:

• CRM system managing customer data
• HR system managing employee data
• Communications platform managing contact information
• Financial system managing payment and account data
• Analytics system managing user behavior data
• Workflow system managing access permissions
• Separate backup and disaster recovery for each system
• Separate security monitoring for each system
• Separate compliance documentation for each system

That’s not one system. That’s an ecosystem of systems, each managing pieces of customer information independently, each requiring separate maintenance, monitoring, and compliance work.

Ensto consolidates identity management into one purpose-built platform. Your applications become simpler because they’re freed from data management responsibilities. Your infrastructure becomes simpler because data doesn’t need to sync across multiple systems. Your compliance work becomes simpler because there’s one system managing all identity data.

Your team’s effort shifts from infrastructure complexity to feature development and customer value.

Real Integration, Real Security, Real Compliance

The conversation about Ensto isn’t theoretical. Real organizations are implementing this right now.

A financial services company was managing customer data across a CRM, a customer service platform, a mobile app, a lending platform, and a back-office system. Data was inconsistent across systems. Compliance audits were nightmarish. Development teams spent weeks managing integrations. Implementing Ensto meant all those systems could work together through a secure identity layer, cutting compliance audit time by 35% and freeing two developers entirely from infrastructure work.

An HR software company was managing employee records in their core HR system, but employee data was being duplicated in onboarding software, scheduling systems, and expense platforms. Updates made in one system didn’t automatically flow to others. New employees sometimes weren’t set up correctly in all systems. Implementing Ensto created a single source of truth for employee identity, reducing onboarding errors by 98% and automating what previously required manual data entry across five systems.

A SaaS platform serving healthcare customers needed to achieve HIPAA compliance while managing customer, employee, and patient data across multiple systems. Fragmentation and distribution of identity data through Ensto provided the security architecture they needed. A process that previously required three months of compliance work per audit now requires three weeks.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re patterns.

The Business Impact: Beyond the Technical Benefits

When you implement Ensto, you’re not just addressing a technical problem. You’re addressing a business transformation.

Your development team gets their time back. Engineers who were spending 40-50% of their cycles on infrastructure and data integration work can now focus on product features that directly impact customer value. That’s not a small thing. That’s a competitive advantage.

Your security team gains confidence. Instead of worrying about data scattered across ten systems, each with different security maturity levels, they have one dedicated platform built specifically for security.

Your compliance team gets peace of mind. Audits become faster, simpler, and more conclusive. The risk of compliance failures drops dramatically.

Your operations team spends less time troubleshooting data sync issues and more time optimizing infrastructure for performance and reliability.

Your leadership team can communicate clearly to customers, investors, and regulators about how you’re managing data security. “We use fragmentary encryption and distributed storage across thousands of database combinations to protect customer data” is a far more compelling story than “our data is stored in multiple systems.”

And your customers develop stronger trust. They know their data is being managed by a company that has thought deeply about identity security rather than a collection of applications that happened to store their information.

The Path Forward: Getting Started with Ensto

If this resonates with your organization, here’s what next steps look like:

First, assess your current state. How many applications are currently storing customer or employee personally identifiable information? If you listed 5+ systems, you’re probably experiencing the data duplication problem described here. Look at your CRM, HR system, communications platform, financial app, analytics tools, and any vertical-specific applications. Count how many places your customers’ email addresses are stored.

Second, evaluate the risk and cost. What would a data breach cost your organization? Run the numbers using the industry data: $4.88 million average, higher if data is spread across multiple environments. Add to that the intangible costs: customer churn, reputation damage, regulatory attention. For many companies, that number exceeds $5-10 million in potential exposure.

Third, quantify the compliance burden. How much effort does your team currently spend managing compliance documentation across multiple systems? How many audit hours does your organization spend per year? What would it be worth to cut that by 30-40%?

Fourth, explore implementation. Ensto’s integration approach is pragmatic. You’re not ripping and replacing existing systems. You’re layering identity management on top of what you already have, then gradually simplifying your stack as you integrate more applications.

Fifth, pilot with a single application. Start by connecting your most critical system—perhaps your CRM or your HR platform—to Ensto. See the benefits firsthand. Learn how the integration works. Build internal confidence in the approach. Then expand to other applications.

The Bigger Picture: Where SaaS Architecture Is Heading

Software companies are built on the assumption that each application owns its data. That’s been the default for decades. The monolithic application storing everything about its users. The siloed database. The proprietary data model.

But that default is breaking down. It’s creating security vulnerabilities. It’s creating compliance nightmares. It’s consuming development resources. It’s limiting business agility.

A new generation of SaaS architecture is emerging—one where applications focus on the business problems they solve, and identity management is handled by a dedicated, secure, specialized platform. This is the future:

• Applications focus on business value. Your CRM focuses on closing deals, not securing data. Your HR system focuses on managing talent, not protecting customer information. Your financial platform focuses on transactions, not storing personally identifiable information. Your workflow system focuses on process optimization, not data management.
• Identity is centralized and specialized. A purpose-built identity platform handles authentication, authorization, profile management, and communications. This platform is built by security experts specifically focused on protecting identity data. It’s not an afterthought in a multi-purpose application. It’s the core focus.
• Data governance becomes scalable. Instead of managing compliance and privacy policies across ten different systems, you manage them in one place. When a new privacy requirement emerges, you implement it once. When a customer requests data access or deletion, you handle it in one system.
• Security becomes defense-in-depth. Data fragmentation, encryption, and distribution mean that compromising one system doesn’t mean compromising all customer data. The attack surface shrinks. The impact of breaches is dramatically reduced.
• Development velocity increases. Your teams spend less time on infrastructure and more time on product. When you add a new tool to your stack, you integrate with one platform instead of building connections to everything. Your time to market accelerates.

Ensto is at the forefront of this architectural evolution. It’s not the future—it’s the present for companies ready to adopt it.

Your Next Step: Taking Action

The complexity and risk of managing customer data across multiple applications isn’t something you have to accept. It’s not an inevitable part of running a SaaS business. There are better approaches.

Companies are already taking action. They’re implementing Ensto. They’re seeing:

• 35-40% reduction in compliance audit time
• 98%+ reduction in onboarding errors and manual data entry
• 70% reduction in potential data breach impact
• Multiple developers freed up from infrastructure work
• Stronger customer relationships built on demonstrated security practices
• Confidence that they’re prepared for privacy regulations regardless of where they operate

Your organization can be next.

Ready to Transform Your Data Management?

Explore how Ensto’s “Applications Over Information” architecture could transform your SaaS platform and eliminate the data duplication burden.

Visit keywix.cloud to learn more about how Ensto can help your organization:

• Manage customer and employee data securely with fragmentation, encryption, and distribution
• Remain compliant with GDPR, Privacy Act, and emerging privacy regulations
• Free your development team to focus on building great products
• Build stronger customer trust through transparent, secure identity management
• Simplify your infrastructure and reduce operational complexity

Or reach out directly:

Email: 

ensto_info@keywix.cloud

Your customers deserve their data to be protected by architecture, not just policy. Your team deserves to focus on product development, not infrastructure management. Your business deserves the competitive advantage that comes from simplified, secure, compliant data management.

Ensto makes all of that possible.

About Keywix

Keywix is an Identity AI startup headquartered in Melbourne, Australia with operations in Pune, India. The company was founded in April 2024 by Tajinder Singh (TJ) and Manpreet Singh (MS), building on over 30 years of combined experience across sales, product development, and data management.

The company’s mission is to bring enterprises and customers together while keeping their information safe, building a new standard for digital identity through an ecosystem of “Applications over Information.”

Ensto is Keywix’s enterprise identity platform, designed for organizations that need to manage customer and employee identity securely while maintaining compliance with modern privacy regulations. Ensto uses patent-pending technology to fragment, encrypt, and intelligently distribute identity data across thousands of secure database combinations, protecting against data breaches while maintaining instant access to unified data when applications need it.

The Ensto platform recently achieved significant milestones, including provisional patent approval in December 2024 and enterprise platform launch in September 2025.

Learn More:

• Website: keywix.cloud
• Email: ensto_info@keywix.cloud
• Follow on LinkedIn: @keywixcloud

For more information about how Ensto can help your organisation manage identity securely and compliantly, visit keywix.cloud today.