Hardened n8n platform for a regulated enterprise

The problem

A large enterprise in a regulated industry wanted n8n, but could not put its data through a vendor-hosted tenant or accept per-task pricing that scaled with usage.

Anything running in their estate had to authenticate against corporate identity, ship its logs to the central SIEM, and survive a security review rather than merely work.

What we built

1. 01

   Queue mode, not a single container

   n8n runs in queue mode with separate worker processes, so a long or failing execution cannot take the editor down with it, and throughput scales by adding workers rather than resizing one box.

2. 02

   Identity through the corporate IdP

   Access sits behind oauth2-proxy with OIDC, so the platform inherits corporate SSO and offboarding instead of maintaining a second list of who works there.

3. 03

   State on managed infrastructure

   PostgreSQL for execution history and Redis for the queue, both operated as first-class stateful services rather than containers with a volume attached and hoped for.

4. 04

   Observability the security team accepts

   Vector ships logs into the corporate SIEM, so platform activity lands in the same place as everything else the security team already monitors.

5. 05

   Hardened images throughout

   Security-hardened containers across the stack, so the review question is about configuration rather than about what is in the base image.

What changed

• ✓The client owns the platform outright. There are no per-task fees, so cost does not rise with successful adoption.
• ✓The stack passed enterprise security review, which is the gate that stops most automation pilots from reaching production.