Multi-tenancy – Definition

An architecture where a single instance of software serves multiple customers (tenants), with each tenant's data isolated and invisible to other tenants.

Multi-tenant systems provide cost efficiency and easier maintenance while ensuring data security and isolation. SaaS platforms typically use multi-tenant architecture to serve thousands of customers from shared infrastructure. The economic logic behind multi-tenancy is straightforward: a shared codebase and shared infrastructure mean a vendor can push a single update to fix a bug or ship a new feature for every customer simultaneously, rather than patching individual, customer-specific deployments — which is why SaaS pricing tends to be lower than the cost of running comparable custom infrastructure. The tradeoff for customers is reduced control: multi-tenant customers generally can't request custom infrastructure changes that would affect other tenants, and they're subject to the vendor's release schedule for platform-level updates. For businesses evaluating a multi-tenant CMS layered on top of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, it's worth understanding exactly what 'tenant isolation' means in practice — whether it's true data-level separation with independent security boundaries, or simply logical separation within shared database tables.