Concept / Term · Established
Shared SaaS architecture
An architecture where multiple customers, or tenants, share at least some application components while their users and data remain appropriately isolated.
Field note
Multi-tenancy is an architecture in which one product platform serves several customer organisations—tenants—while keeping their identities, configuration and data appropriately isolated.
The property metaphor predates cloud software: several tenants share a building and its infrastructure while occupying separate spaces. SaaS adopted the language for shared computing platforms.
Isolation can be implemented in application logic, database structures, separate databases or dedicated infrastructure depending on risk and scale.
Sharing infrastructure improves efficiency, but an isolation error can expose one customer’s data to another and become a severe security incident.
In a sentence“Every query includes the tenant boundary, and higher-risk customers receive separate encryption keys.”