Glossary
Multi-tenant
An architecture in which a single software instance serves several customers, whose data is kept logically separate.
- Multitenancy
The relevant question in an audit is not whether the platform is multi-tenant, but where the boundary between tenants sits and what holds it up. There is a large difference between separation that depends on a filter in every database query and separation resting on distinct schemas, databases or infrastructure accounts.
The three places it fails in practice are always the same: identities that can switch context without re-authentication; background jobs and exports that run with elevated permissions and skip the filter; and shared logs or caches where other customers’ identifiers leak.
For a buyer with regulatory obligations there are two further practical questions: whether they can obtain their own audit logs without them containing somebody else’s activity, and whether the hosting region for their tenant is a contractual guarantee or a default setting the provider can change.