Glossary
Multi-Tenancy
Multi-tenancy is an architecture where a single instance of an application serves multiple customers, with each customer’s data logically isolated from every other customer’s.
General definition
In a multi-tenant system, one deployed instance, including its servers, databases and application code, is shared across many customers (tenants). Each tenant sees only their own data because the application enforces isolation at the software layer, using separate database rows, schemas or namespaces keyed to a tenant identifier.
- Cost-efficient for vendors: infrastructure is shared and thus easier to operate at scale
- Faster provisioning: new tenants are added with a configuration change rather than a new deployment
- Shared upgrade cycle: all tenants run the same version of the software
- Compliance tradeoff: tenants must trust the vendor’s isolation guarantees and share exposure to infrastructure-level incidents
The alternative is a single-tenant or dedicated deployment, where each customer gets their own isolated instance. Regulated industries often prefer single-tenant or on-premise deployments because the data boundary is physical rather than logical, which is easier to demonstrate to auditors.
In the Ethora ecosystem
Ethora’s cloud offering is multi-tenant by design, allowing many product teams to use the platform efficiently. For enterprise customers in regulated industries, Ethora also supports single-tenant dedicated server deployments and fully self-hosted configurations where the customer’s data never shares infrastructure with any other organisation.
When compliance frameworks such as HIPAA or ISO 27001 require documented isolation, the dedicated and self-hosted options give auditors a clear, physical boundary to inspect. The audit log records all administrative actions within the instance, further supporting compliance evidence.
