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What is Multi-Tenant Security?

insightsoftware -
January 17, 2022

insightsoftware is a global provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions, empowering organizations to unlock business data and transform the way finance and data teams operate.

Esma Esef What You Need To Know

Multi-tenancy is a software architecture that uses a single application to serve multiple customers (or tenants). By using multi-tenancy, you can create one application and then deploy it to as many customers as you want, so you don’t have to recreate a separate solution for each end user.

Because multi-tenancy serves multiple customers, you need to secure your solution in a way that prevents tenants from viewing each other’s data. Online banking is a good example of multi-tenancy. When a bank creates its online banking application, each end user receives their individual, secure information via multi-tenant security.

Your embedded analytics solution should follow the same protocol. It should be robust enough to deliver value through a single solution, but versatile enough to deploy your solution to multiple customers.

Let’s take a closer look at what multi-tenant security entails.

Key Considerations for Multi-Tenant Security

To properly secure your multi-tenant application, consider your customer-centric solutions and the security of your data.

Customer-Centric Solutions

Your team might receive a list of requirements that call for bespoke solutions, which are tailored to each user’s needs. Perhaps your customer wants your team to apply a particular styling with specific layouts for their end users. Configuring your embedded analytics solution in these cases should be fairly straightforward. You can reapply the definitions and configurations from your existing application framework or ecosystem to your new embedded analytics solution.

Security of Your Data

Data is at the heart of every embedded analytics solution, and multi-tenant is no exception. Make sure your data connection—or the data you’re delivering to your end users—has a firewall or is constrained for each specific user. Separate tenants should not be able to see each other’s data.

Data Structure for Your Embedded Analytics Solution

You need data, so what’s the best way to get it into your product? The answer depends on how you’ve defined your database. Ask specific questions to drill down into what’s most important for your customers, for example:

  • Is your customer’s database shared by each unique tenant?
  • Are the schemas or table definitions in your solution unique for each tenant?
  • Has your application team created tables with only a tenant ID column that they filter against?

Most applications teams structure their data based on individual business use cases. However, for most use cases, your embedded analytics solution should have the following capabilities:

  • Connect to different data models and ensure that users can see only their specific data.
  • Tokenize your data connections so they don’t bleed data between tenants.
  • Have the capacity to filter data.
  • Deliver everything through a security mechanism.

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Key Takeaways

  • Multi-tenancy is a software architecture in which a single application serves multiple customers (or tenants).
  • Multi-tenancy means you can deliver a valuable solution once without redoing each user endpoint.
  • Embedded analytics solutions must allow for flexibility to connect to these different data models and show only their tenant-specific data.

Learn more about multi-tenant security in this video.