Multi-tenancy is the ability of services to be offered to multiple user entities or tenants, such that it appears to them that they are fully isolated, when in reality, they're still using physically shared resources. A key point I want to convey here is that the amount of work required for setting up a new Cloud tenant depends upon where the multi-tenancy point sits within the technology stack. I'd like to pose another question. Let's say you're the administrator of a computing environment, say a data center, and you're responsible for setting up the infrastructure such that new end users can access an application running on your infrastructure. You now see several models of multi-tenancy in front of you, for example, physical multi-tenancy, where each tenant is completely physically isolated. That is, each tenant has his own stack of servers. Or consider for example, operating system level multi-tenancy, where each tenant is a new user on an operating system. Now, the question is this: which of these levels of multi-tenancy is the easiest for you to set up? Well, here's the answer. The higher the multi-tenancy point, the less effort is required for setting up a new tenant, because more underlying technology is shared. Therefore, application level multi-tenancy would be the easiest for you to set up. Conversely, the higher the multi-tenancy point, the more resources can be shared among tenants. The benefits of Cloud are quite self-evident. Over the last decade, several studies have been done on private and public Cloud infrastructures, and most have concluded that the benefits of Cloud computing are overwhelming. It's contributed to so much innovation as well. Think of all the streaming services, ride-hailing services, and so on, which all use Cloud computing in some way. For your enterprise, you can reap several benefits by moving to a Cloud. Cloud enables customers to consolidate and standardize their instances, change the way IT is managed and consumed, focus on their core business needs, reduce the time to market for their solutions, reduce the cost of deploying instances, and also, it helps IT staff efficiently manage hardware resources, lowers IT operating and capital costs, helps with fine-grain tuning of the offered IT services, helps with fast provisioning of IT resources, and reduces IT complexity for users and staff. To summarize, it reduces costs and increases flexibilities. That's why CIOs love it so much. The table you see here shows how utilization can improve. You can also see that what you previously have taken months to provision can now be provisioned in an unlimited manner because of the self-service dashboard a Cloud environment provides.
