Multi-Tenancy Misconceptions in Cloud Computing

One of the biggest benefits of the cloud, ‘Dynamic Scaling,' goes hand-in-hand with multi tenancy. If your application has a fixed group of users, you can easily predict the server load and still handle it with a typical data center. However, a large number of users, basically multi tenants, makes the cloud platform most efficient in terms of usability of the application and ‘Do More With Less Resources.'

Some of the other characteristics of a typical multi-tenant application, benefited by Cloud are:

• Large global population working across time zones
• Quite possible that at any time 100% usage is not possible, but rather 70-80%
• Application serves a global common process for most, but yet is customizable for local needs

Multi Tenancy & Large Enterprises:
Many IT groups within the large enterprise including CXOs view multi-tenant applications as the one that hosts a disparate group of individuals or organizations. The main reason being the most successful cloud applications that come to mind are:

• Salesforce.com: a SaaS-based CRM application for various businesses using common framework and multi tenancy model
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online offering
• Multi-Tenancy IaaS/PaaS offerings from Amazon or IBM or Microsoft Azure

So the common misconception is that multi tenancy is all about resources shared by more than one organization. This leads to many discussions on Multi Tenancy Cloud, cut short by the stakeholders with the statement that ‘We Don't Need Multi Tenancy'.

However, through careful analysis of how the enterprise applications have been built and managed, we find that the multi tenancy is very much a feature of large enterprises, and utilizing a Private or Public cloud model with a multi-tenant attribute for their existing applications will definitely provide value for large enterprises.