Tenant

What does tenant mean in IT?

In IT, this term refers to a logically isolated unit within a shared infrastructure. The English term “tenant” means “tenant” – appropriately, a tenant is often compared to an apartment in a large building. The underlying hardware or platform is shared, while each tenant has its own protected environment.

This model is particularly common in cloud environments. Each tenant has its own user accounts, authorizations, configurations and data. The separation per tenant ensures that sensitive data is managed securely and independently of each other. This principle is used in cloud services such as Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS and in many SaaS solutions.

Clean demarcation between tenants is also essential for mobile device management, identity management and in the context of modern cyber security.

Safety and areas of application

The tenant model offers many advantages: It enables application security at client level, reduces the risk of security threats and makes it easier to meet compliance requirements. In professional IT architectures, security controls and role-based access are used to implement least privilege – each person only receives the authorizations they really need.

When using complex applications or platforms, additional security measures can be used. These include

• Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
• Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
• Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)
• Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Penetration testing is also regularly used in cloud environments to detect potential security flaws or identified vulnerabilities at an early stage. Attacks such as denial of service can be specifically warded off or isolated by clearly separated tenants.

The tenant model provides a reliable basis, especially for companies that want to combine application security and real-time monitoring. Incident response plans can be set up in a structured manner – and executed on a tenant basis in an emergency without jeopardizing other areas.