Software is the brain of all modern industries. Organizations today require a range of software to perform their operations seamlessly and uninterrupted. In the sea of digital products and services, the decision to pick the best software tool is not an easy one to make. In the last decade, we have seen rapid movement of software from on-premise to the cloud. This form of software delivery is known as SaaS. SaaS leverages the economies of scale enabled by a large number of customers using the service, which is delivered from the same underlying software platform. This form of product delivery is termed multi tenancy.
Cloud computing has been around for over a decade, but the competitive advantage it holds for businesses has lately been manifested. The majority of big businesses have now invested in cloud computing and big data as they recognize the huge advantages they will have in the future. SaaS or Software-as-a-Service is a form of cloud computing in which cloud-hosted computer applications are delivered over the internet. This form of computing eliminates the complexity of managing expensive hardware and software on-premises, above and beyond the internal resources. And the cost advantage of the cloud infrastructure being shared by users across the world is significant.
Multitenancy is a form of SaaS delivery in which multiple users share a common instance of software hosted in the cloud. It allows required customization for individual customers, such as branding via UI tweaks and color, etc. In a single tenancy model, each customer runs their own copy of the system, with their own copies of the processes. The more customers you have, the more copies of the processes you need to manage. Single tenancy also puts a limitation on fine-graining the application, that is, its ability to be delivered in a microservice architecture, as a larger number of microservices need to be maintained and updated for every individual instance of software.
Whereas multi-tenant architecture is a highly efficient, horizontally scalable distributed system, it can support more customers on fewer nodes, and fewer nodes mean reduced cost. It also supports microservice architecture, as an entire batch of users can be provided with updates in one go. The security apprehensions arising out of the fact that a great number of clients are hosted in a single hardware are overcome by strong security measures; each tenant’s data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants. This way, customers do not share or see each other’s data. High-risk industries like banking mostly use multi tenancy architecture to maintain customer accounts and databases, which is strong evidence that multi tenancy is safe for end users. Besides, SaaS systems have become parts of our daily lives in the form of Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Phil Wainewright, founder of ASPNEWS.com and a thought leader in cloud computing, compares changes in the IT landscape brought by cloud computing to that of the automobile revolution in the early 1900s. If early motorists had only ever wanted to drive on their own private land, automobile innovation would have peaked with the golf buggy. Private clouds and single-tenant SaaS applications are just as limited, and that’s why multi-tenancy matters. “Multitenancy matters because it’s the ideal architecture to make the most of the public cloud environment. A multi-tenant application runs on a shared platform that is constantly being fine-tuned to succeed better at those interactions. Multitenancy benefits enormously from the magic of something I call collective scrutiny and innovation. When hundreds or even thousands of other businesses are using the same operational infrastructure, all of them benefit from each of the different ways in which they’re challenging and stretching that shared infrastructure.”
Vendors of multi-tenant software benefit immensely from the architecture, as they need to maintain and make updates only at one central application to share it with all the users, whereas in a single tenancy architecture, the provider has to touch multiple instances of the software to make updates, which is cumbersome and resource-intensive. In multi tenancy, an entire group of users shares resources like servers, heating, cooling, security, and more. All these benefits converted into reduced cost are passed down to the users, which means multi-tenant services are cheaper. The opportunity to save money takes many forms and becomes greater as the application scales up. This reduces the cost of doing business for the vendor, and savings can be passed on to customers.
Multitenancy as an approach for product delivery for vendors needs to be adapted at the time of the conception and design, bringing it in at a later stage will create chaos as the shift from single tenancy architecture to multi tenancy after the first instance of product delivery entails risky production data migrations, systemic changes to every single service and data entity, and potential backwards incompatibility with older clients.
Multitenancy as a true architecture for SaaS brings the highest level of efficiency in SaaS as it fully leverages the cloud environment. For organizations adopting multitenancy, it allows for more efficient use of IT resources. It requires less upfront infrastructure procurement and saves resources dedicated to ongoing management and upgrades. mon’k, the flagship digital content delivery and e-learning platform from Impelsys, is a true multi-tenant SaaS platform with microservice architecture. It supports content in formats like ebooks, journals, videos, courses, and others, making it a one-stop solution for all things digital content delivery and online learning.
