An Architectural Review of Multi-Tenancy in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing has become a popular ingredient in the information management of enterprises cutting across the globe and size. Its popularity lies in its ability to provide resources – infrastructure, platform, and software – as services on demand without compromising much on the quality of service. On-demand resource provisioning is possible by sharing the resources across multiple users or multiple tenants. Among all the three (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) deployments, SaaS offers more cost benefit to enterprises and users as compared to its predecessors because of its ability to share both hardware and software across multiple tenants with very minimal data sharing. The feature of sharing resources among multiple users known as multi tenancy is essential in achieving the objectives of cloud computing. This paper gives a detailed account of multi tenancy in cloud computing with special focus on SaaS applications and its associated problems followed by solution approaches.