Technical Terms

Multi-Tenant

An architecture where a single software instance serves multiple customers with logical separation of their data and configuration.

Multi-tenancy is the default architecture for modern SaaS because it is operationally efficient: one codebase, one deployment, one infrastructure bill, serving thousands of customers simultaneously. Each customer (tenant) shares the same application and database infrastructure but has logically isolated data — they cannot see each other's records. This enables economies of scale that make low-priced subscription products economically viable. The technical challenge is ensuring complete isolation between tenants: a bug that leaks one customer's data to another is a catastrophic security and trust failure. Multi-tenancy also requires careful database design and query optimisation since performance must remain consistent across tenants of vastly different sizes. Most enterprise customers ask about tenancy model during procurement as part of their security review.