Glossary · Platform

Multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy is an architecture in which one running installation of an application serves many independent customer organisations, each of which sees only its own data.

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What Multi-tenancy means

The alternative is one installation per customer, which is simpler to reason about and considerably more expensive to run, patch and monitor. Multi-tenancy trades that operational cost for a correctness obligation: every read and every write must be scoped to the right organisation, every time, with no exceptions anywhere in the codebase.

The obligation is harder than it sounds because it is a whole-system property rather than a feature. A single endpoint that forgets its scope, a single background job that queries by identifier alone, a single log line or metric labelled with the wrong organisation, and the guarantee is gone — while every test that checks a feature still passes.

This is why serious multi-tenant systems assert the tenant once, at a choke point every request passes through, rather than remembering to do it at each call site. The design goal is that forgetting becomes impossible rather than merely discouraged.

How Enclessa uses it

Enclessa is a multi-tenant hosted service: one installation serves every customer organisation, each reachable at its own hostname. The organisation is taken from the session at a single choke point and never from a parameter a caller supplies. How that is proven rather than asserted is described under tenant isolation.

Related terms

Tenant isolationTenant isolation is the guarantee that no request made by one customer organisation can read or change any data belonging to another, enforced by the system rather than by convention.Read the entry Data residencyData residency is the requirement that data be stored and processed within a named geographic territory, usually a country or an economic area such as the European Union.Read the entry Seat-based pricingSeat-based pricing charges a fixed amount for each person who can use a product, so the bill is the seat price multiplied by the number of people rather than by how much they use it.Read the entry SubprocessorA subprocessor is a third party that a processor engages to carry out part of the processing of personal data on the controller’s behalf — a hosting provider, a payment provider or an email relay, for example.Read the entry Single sign-on (SSO)Single sign-on is an arrangement in which one identity provider authenticates a person once and then vouches for them to other applications, so that each application never handles their password.Read the entry

Read further

The security page explains how Enclessa protects data and which certifications it does not hold. The trust centre covers the processing agreement, the subprocessors and the residency position. The FAQ answers the questions buyers ask most often.

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