Single-tenant
Also called: single tenant · dedicated instance · multi-tenant
A deployment model where each client runs on its own dedicated application and database, with no infrastructure shared between clients.
Single-tenant is the deployment model in which each client receives its own dedicated instance of the application and its own database, as opposed to multi-tenant models where many clients share one installation and their data coexists in shared tables separated by a logical tenant discriminator.
The difference matters most to regulated buyers. In a multi-tenant system, isolation is a property of the application code: one missing filter in one query can expose another tenant's data. In a single-tenant system, isolation is a property of the architecture: there is no other tenant in the database to leak from. It also changes operations — each client can be upgraded, backed up, restored or audited independently, and a client's performance is not affected by a neighbour's load. The trade-off is operational cost for the vendor, which is why multi-tenancy dominates commodity SaaS and single-tenancy persists where the data is worth the dedicated infrastructure.
On this site: Security →