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Below Peter Coffee, Ddirector of Platform Research, salesforce.com, helps to explain multi-tenancy, how it is an enabler for effective cloud computing, and the competitive landscape. Additionally, I was able to chat with Peter to offer more insight on the myths of multi-tenancy and how to leverage it. Download Peter Coffee’s Multi-Tenancy whitepaper.
What are the 3 Biggest Myths Surrounding Multi-tenancy
Myth 1: Server virtualization provides the same benefits as multi-tenancy
Server virtualization provides superficial gains in flexible capacity addition, but in the process creates additional copies of many of the complexities and failure modes of conventional architectures
Myth 2: Multi-tenancy limits application customization
Multi-tenant applications enable deep customization if designed from the outset to represent customizations as robust metadata, rather than requiring complex and brittle code-level modification.
Myth 3: Multi-tenancy benefits the service provider rather than the service consumer
Multi-tenant application design improves separation between shared and private data and logic, easing customer adoption of service improvements compared to single-tenant or isolated-tenant environments
Multi-tenant code base unity streamlines introduction of new platform capabilities, giving customers more rapid improvements without application rewrites and other costs of conventional software upgrades
What are the top 5 reasons to leverage multi-tenancy
- Maximize advantage from future trends in processor performance: Moore’s Law is alive and well, but its jurisdiction has shifted: going forward, the cost per unit of capacity on shared systems will improve far more quickly than that of single-user machines
- Minimize leakage of data to the ungovernable edge of the network: Rising standards of governance, combined with growing complexity of threat environments, demand that data and logic reside on professionally configured and administered systems rather than end-user hardware
- Focus developer talent on competitive differentiation rather than commodity software maintenance: Developer skills are increasingly scarce and expensive: companies must offer opportunities to do creative work, and must not waste limited resources on capabilities that can be shared among many organizations
- Integrate custom applications with best-of-breed Web services and data streams: Strategic applications increasingly generate value by combining expertise and information from many sources, making it attractive to build applications in multi-tenant environments that simplify connection
- Extend the power of high-end enterprise systems to field offices, supply-chain partners and customers : Multi-tenant systems, designed for precisely controlled sharing and separation of data and function, reduce the difficulties and risks of presenting different views and feature sets to diverse (but cooperating) user communities
