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What is Multi-tenancy?

Multi-tenancy is an architecture in which a single instance of a software application serves multiple distinct customers, each one of them being isolated in terms of data and performance. Each customer is called a Domain.

Multi-tenancy
Figure: Multi-tenancy

What is Single-tenancy?

Single-tenancy is an architecture in which a single instance of the software and all the supporting infrastructure serves a single customer. With single tenancy, each customer has their own independent database and instance of the software.

Figure: Single-tenancy

Using SummitAI's Multi-tenancy feature, the Managed Service Providers (MSP) can make sure that the Users, Customers (Departments), Locations, and Vendor details of one domain are not accessible to another. This is achieved by mapping the Role Template details of a domain to the User. Even though multiple customers use the same database and server, the data is completely secure as the users will be able to access only the domain to which they have Role Template access.

Multi-tenancy is useful in a Managed Service Provider environment. The MSP partner of SummitAI , can outsource the application to multiple entities using a single Server and Database. The MSP partner is a Global Domain, the customers of the MSP are Domain, and the internal departments of the customer are called Tenant.

Multi-tenancy - Workflow
Figure: Multi-tenancy - Workflow

The following attributes are now domain-specific:

Location
Customer (Department)
Designation
User Level
Vendor
Tenant

Multi-tenancy enables you to do the following:

Control data access in a hosted environment. For example, in a MSP environment, multiple companies might use a single application, with the data for each company hidden from the other companies using the application.
Each new customer can be hosted on the same database rather than individual servers, so a provider that offers a multi-tenant solution will lease far less data center equipment compared to a provider offering a single-tenant solution supporting a comparable number of customers. Since each customer does not require its own data center equipment in a multi-tenant environment, the cost of adding customers is fractional compared to a single tenant solution.

Benefits of Multi-tenancy:

Cost and Hardware - A major benefit to multi-tenancy is on the cost side. With resource pooling, there are considerable savings in hardware and power. With single tenancy, a separate physical or virtual machine is required for each customer.
Effort to Upgrade - With Multi-tenancy, forced upgrades can be seamless, as upgrades don’t require any customer intervention, when thousands of customers are upgraded simultaneously.
Backups and Redundancy - Creating that level of redundancy would be a lot more technically challenging, if tens of thousands of customers each had their own virtual server.

Accessing the Feature

The administrators can configure the domain from the COMMON MASTERS page of the SummitAI application. For more details about the Common Master page, see Configuring Common Masters.

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