What is Multi-Tenancy?
2026-11-04
When physical or software infrastructure serves several independent customers — known as tenants — at the same time, it is described as multi-tenant. In this architectural model, each customer receives its own logically isolated environment, while all customers share the underlying physical resources of one or more servers.
Tenant isolation can be implemented at different layers, from the hypervisor and virtual machines to the operating system, database, network, or application. In cloud infrastructure, multitenancy makes it possible to distribute the resources of a single physical data center among many independent customers while keeping their workloads and data separate. The multitenancy model is widely used across all major classes of cloud services, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Depending on the use case, security requirements, and resource-consumption model, tenants may operate on shared physical servers with isolated virtual machines, use separate clusters, or receive fully dedicated hardware for their exclusive use.