Glossary A–ZLetter M
Multi-tenancy
Multi-tenancy means that a single installation of a piece of software serves several separate customers or organisational units whose data, users and settings are invisible to one another.
Each such separate area is called a tenant.
A service provider might, for example, look after several customers with one management system; each customer has its own devices, media, playlists and accounts and sees only its own data. Large companies also use tenants, for instance for subsidiaries or countries. Shared content such as templates can be made available to several tenants by whoever administers the installation.
What matters is how strictly the separation is implemented, for example in separate databases or as separate views within a shared database, and who sits above all tenants. Operators should clarify whether the provider’s administrators can see all tenants’ data and whether this is logged. Multi-tenancy is not the same as permission management within one company: the fact that a branch only maintains its own screens is usually handled through roles and sharing.