What is a tenant in cloud computing?

A tenant in cloud computing is a single customer, team, or organization that shares a cloud system with other customers while keeping its own data, users, and settings walled off from everyone else. The word comes from renting: many tenants, one building.

Each tenant sees only its own slice of the system. To the user it feels like a private application, even though the same software is quietly serving hundreds of other tenants in the background.

This is the basic unit of any multi tenant system. Understanding the tenant boundary is the first step to understanding how cloud SaaS keeps everyone’s data apart.

Related terms: multi tenancy, multi tenant architecture, resource pooling.

Can one company be multiple tenants?

Yes. Large organizations often run separate tenants for different departments or regions.