Traditional SaaS vendors ask you to trust their security. Trust their compliance frameworks. Trust their employee access controls. Trust their infrastructure won't get breached.
But trust isn't a security model. Especially not when your financial data is involved.
The real solution lies in the underlying architecture: eliminate the need for trust entirely by keeping your financial data within your own infrastructure.
This is something our team feels passionately about. It's why we built CoPlane to operate on a completely different architecture — one that doesn't rely on trust and doesn't create vendor lock-in.
The Problem with Traditional SaaS
Most enterprise software treats security like a feature you add later. Encryption here, access controls there, some compliance checkboxes. But security should start with architecture decisions.
The question is simple: where is your data, who controls it, and what are the trust boundaries?
Traditional SaaS vendors want your data in their cloud because it's easier for them to operate and ensures lock-in. They say "enterprise-grade security," but your sensitive data sits in their systems, on their networks, and possibly in jurisdictions you don't want.
This creates a security model based on trust. You trust they won't get breached. You trust their employees won't look at your data. You trust their infrastructure meets your compliance needs. But this is not really security — it's hoping nothing bad happens.
How We Built CoPlane Differently
Architecture is not just about choosing the right database or writing clean code. Architecture is whatever you cannot change easily later: your database schema, yes, but also your security model, data placement, and communication patterns.
Conway's Law says we build systems that look like our org charts, but I think it goes deeper. Our early architectural decisions become constraints that we live with for years. Make wrong assumptions about security or data placement early, and you'll spend the next several years trying to fix them. I've seen this happen many times.
CoPlane takes a different approach by splitting the system into two parts:
The Control Plane runs on our infrastructure at coplane.com, handling authentication, configuration, and coordination. But it never sees your business data. Think of the Control Plane like air traffic control — it coordinates flights, but doesn't touch the cargo.
The Data Plane runs entirely in your infrastructure: in your VPC, behind your firewall, maybe behind your VPN. This is where your financial data lives and business logic runs.
The important thing is what doesn't happen: our cloud never sees your financial transactions, vendor records, or payment data. It cannot, because the architecture prevents it.
The Guiding Principle: Your Data Never Leaves Home
This hybrid architecture eliminates whole categories of security risks.
When your sensitive data never leaves your network, you don't need to trust us with it. When our cloud services cannot access your production data, there's no risk of our employees seeing it or our systems getting compromised in ways that expose it.
Instead, your browser connects both planes. Your employees can access your internal network (the Data Plane) and public internet (the Control Plane), so they get a single interface without breaking security boundaries.
This aligns with zero-trust principles but keeps the user experience simple.
Let's dig into what this looks like in practice.
Authentication Without Dependence
Our authentication reflects this split architecture. We integrate with your existing identity provider (IDP) — like Okta, Microsoft Entra, or Google Workspace — using SAML and OpenID Connect. But the tokens for accessing your Data Plane are short-lived and validated locally using public keys from your IDP.
Even if our cloud gets completely compromised, attackers cannot access your production data because the Data Plane operates independently within your security perimeter. The trust boundary is clear: your IDP verifies identity, you control data processing.
Architecture That Matches Reality
This design philosophy extends beyond security to organizational alignment.
Conway's Law is relevant here. Your finance team operates in your corporate network, connecting to your ERP, payment processors, and internal databases. They don't want to send this data to external vendors.
CoPlane's architecture works with this reality instead of against it. We provide coordination layers for sophisticated workflows while respecting your operational boundaries. The software adapts to your organizational structure rather than forcing the reverse.
Complete Operational Control
There are practical benefits to a hybrid architecture as well: When the Data Plane runs in your infrastructure, you control performance, availability, and scaling. You can deploy behind VPNs, integrate with on-premises systems, and meet data residency requirements without special contract negotiations.
Most important: you eliminate vendor risk. If CoPlane disappears tomorrow, your Data Plane installations keep working because they don't depend on our cloud for core functionality. This is not just business continuity — it's architectural insurance.
Not a free lunch
The hybrid architecture represents a deliberate investment on our part - it comes with real tradeoffs that we've had to carefully consider.
For us at CoPlane, it means building and testing against multiple deployment targets. We can't assume a single cloud provider or standardized environment. It also means additional overhead for us to support our customers.
However, we've made this architectural choice intentionally because we believe the security benefits for our customers far outweigh the additional engineering effort for our team.
We're also continuously investing in automation, infrastructure-as-code, and observability tools that help us manage this complexity efficiently. As our platform evolves, we expect these technological investments to further streamline operations while maintaining the core security benefits of our hybrid approach.
The bottom line: we absorb the complexity so you don't have to, because we believe your financial data deserves this level of architectural consideration.
Built for an Uncertain Future
These design decisions also position you for long-term success.
Good architecture addresses not today's requirements, but creates a foundation that can evolve. CoPlane's hybrid design enables things impossible with traditional SaaS: true multi-cloud deployment, air-gapped installations for regulated environments, and integration with legacy systems that cannot connect to external services.
As privacy regulations tighten and enterprise security gets stricter, our day-one architectural decisions position customers to adapt instead of rebuild. When the foundation is solid, evolution becomes enhancement rather than replacement.
The Future is Hybrid
Looking ahead, I believe we're seeing a fundamental shift.
The "cloud-first" default is ending. Smart enterprises recognize that different workloads have different requirements, and security-sensitive applications demand different architectural approaches.
CoPlane's hybrid architecture is not a compromise — it's an optimization for enterprise reality. By separating control from data processing, authentication from authorization, and coordination from execution, we built a system that delivers cloud-native capabilities while respecting enterprise security requirements.
When architecture aligns with operational realities instead of fighting them, it becomes a competitive advantage. This is the foundation we built CoPlane on.
If eliminating vendor risk while maintaining AI capabilities sounds valuable for your finance operations, let's talk! Reach out to founders@coplane.com.