What is Multi-Tenancy?
Multi-tenancy means that a single instance of the software and its supporting infrastructure serves multiple customers.
In the early days of the cloud, organizations were reluctant to adopt cloud strategies. Few organizations considered applying policies, technologies, and controls to protect data across the cloud. The last several years, which has seen the proven effectiveness of cloud deployments in scalability, cost, and security, has changed that, however. Now we’re seeing the rapid adoption of cloud platforms by organizations of all shapes and sizes.
Fortra DLP is SaaS-delivered, to provide data protection in a package that results in superior security, better economics, and reduced overhead. One of the ways we do this is through multi-tenant architecture.
In this post, we'll walk through why that is, as well as the key differences between multi-tenant vs single-tenant architecture.
Single Tenant vs Multi-Tenant – What Does Each Term Mean?
Single Tenant – A single instance of the software and supporting infrastructure serve a single customer. With single tenancy, each customer has his or her own independent multi-tenant database and instance of the software. Essentially, there is no sharing happening with this option.
Potential benefits of single-tenant include:
- Security: A single customer and a single server is often contained on secure hardware being used by a limited number of people.
- Dependability: With an entire environment dedicated to one client, resources are abundant and available anytime.
- Customization: Control over the entire environment allows for customization and added functionality, if desired.
Potential drawbacks of single-tenant:
- Maintenance: Single-tenant typically means more tasks and regular maintenance to keep things running smoothly and efficiently.
- Setup/Management: By comparison, SaaS multi-tenant environments are quick to setup and manage.
- Cost: Single-tenant typically allows for more resources, but at a premium price given that there is only one customer for the entire environment.
Multi-Tenant – Multi-tenant means that a single instance of the software and its supporting infrastructure serves multiple customers. Each customer shares the software application and also shares a single database. Each tenant’s data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants.
Potential benefits of multi-tenant:
- Affordable Cost: Multiple customers means that the cost for the environment is shared, and those savings (from the SaaS vendor) are typically transferred to the cost of the software.
- Integrations: Cloud environments allow for easier integration with other applications through the use of APIs.
- “Hands-free” Maintenance: The server technically belongs to the SaaS vendor, meaning that a certain level of database maintenance is handled by the vendor, instead of you maintaining the environment yourself.
Potential drawbacks of multi-tenant:
- Limited Management/Customization: While you do have added integration benefits, custom changes to the database aren’t typically an option.
- Security: Other tenants won’t see your data. However, multiple users (not associated with your organization) are allowed on the same database. This broader access reduces control of security.
- Updates/Changes: If you’re reliant on integrations with other SaaS products and one updates their system, it may cause issues with those connecting apps.
Benefits of SaaS Multi-Tenant Architecture
- Lower costs through economies of scale: With multi-tenancy, scaling has far fewer infrastructure implications than with a single-tenancy-hosted solution because new users get access to the same basic software.
- Shared infrastructure leads to lower costs: SaaS allows companies of all sizes to share infrastructure and data center operational costs. There is no need to add applications and more hardware to their environment. Not having to provision or manage any infrastructure or software above and beyond internal resources enables businesses to focus on everyday tasks.
- Ongoing maintenance and updates: Customers don’t need to pay costly maintenance fees to keep their software up to date. Vendors roll out new features and updates. These are often included with a SaaS subscription.
- Configuration can be done while leaving the underlying codebase unchanged: Single-tenant-hosted solutions are often customized, requiring changes to an application’s code. This customization can be costly and can make upgrades time-consuming because the upgrade might not be compatible with your environment.
Multi-tenant solutions are designed to be highly configurable so that businesses can make the application perform the way they want. There is no changing the code or data structure, making the upgrade process easy.
Multi-tenancy architecture also allows Fortra DLP to efficiently service everyone from small customers, whose scale may not warrant dedicated infrastructure, to large enterprises that need access to the cloud’s virtually unlimited compute resources. Software development and maintenance costs are shared, driving down expenditures, resulting in savings that are passed onto you, the customers.