What is Multitenancy? - c06657196

“Multitenancy” is the fundamental technology that clouds use to share resources cost-efficiently and securely among multiple subscribers. PrinterOn is a modern Software as a Service (“SaaS”) architecture that is built with multitenancy inherent in its design. PrinterOn employs industry-standard techniques and security methods to deliver multitenancy.

The PrinterOn multi-tenant design reflects separation of service data from the service components that manipulate and process subscriber requests and subscriber data. PrinterOn also uses an abstracted data model. The overall benefit of this multi-tenant design is the data processing components can be shared across all tenants safely and securely, eliminating the security concern regarding persistent subscriber data storage within these components. Within PrinterOn, these components include services such as document converters, or data delivery components where the data is typically transient.

PrinterOn subscriber tenant data is logically organized such that each tenant is uniquely managed and has a globally unique organization ID representing the tenant within the multi-tenant data store. These obfuscated data IDs facilitate anonymized access and references to data that may be used across the shared services. This ensures that unnecessary data sharing is avoided and at the same time maximizes the efficient use of the shared components. PrinterOn's service model is based on a microservice design.

Micro-service architecture enables delegation of duties to purpose-built components. This minimizes the need for information access by any one component. An individual shared service can perform complex and/or commonly-requested operations on tenant data without sharing tenant-specific information with other components. Components are provided the minimal information necessary to perform an operation. References to tenant data are obfuscated whenever possible so that a wide range of shared services can be used safely and securely across all tenants without sharing tenant-specific information.

Tenant-specific information is not accessible to users outside the tenant’s scope. Access to tenant-identifying information is strictly controlled using industry-standard authentication and authorization. This ensures that only authorized users within a single tenant can access the unique organization’s IDs which are used to retrieve the information needed to carry out the requested service action.