I have (like many others) been part of several debates and conversations on why is multitenancy important for the cloud. Alok Misra posts an interesting article in Information World with a lot of valid reasons and certainly I agree with them.
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/blog/archives/2010/02/why_multitenanc.html?catid=cloud-computing
Here is what I have to add -
I was recently on a call with Oracle and talking through the multitenancy capabilities of a SaaS product that I am consulting for. In that conversation and another conversation with a prospective enterprise customer, one thing became very clear -
A typical enterprise customer does not care whether you SaaS solution is multitenant or not. Actually, they probably rather hear that it is not, thus reducing some of the typical data security and segregation concerns. Based on this first hand experience, I am changing my marketing pitch as follows:
1. To Analysts, VC’s etc – Pitch multitenancy – they care a lot and will not necassiarly consider you a ”SaaS” solution unless you are multitenant.
2. To Enterprise Customers – Spend as close to 0 time in your sales pitch on multi-tenancy. Focus on the problem you are solving for them and how you will lower their costs; but not on multitenancy.
As part of Enterprise IT, you might have been asked this questions a few times now – “Should we be using a Cloud as part of our data center strategy?”
In order to answer this questions, here is some food for thought…
What do you expect the benefits to be?
- Data Center Agility – managing unpredictable demand
- Economic – Capex to Opex, overall cost saving
- Simplicity – Less headache; managing a data center is not your core competency
Define the scope of this effort for you
- Phased approach – maybe move non-production systems to the cloud
- Define Risk – Acceptable risk tolerances for your enterprise might impact scope
- Is SaaS an option – reduce some services that you currently run by using SaaS (HR systems, time/expense management, email, document management etc)
- What internal business processes will have to change if you have services provided in the Cloud?
Vendor Selection
- Define criteria to select a cloud vendor – technology support, reliability, availability, scalability, security, disaster recovery, market reputation etc
- Which vendors are best suited to address your needs?
- Maybe select 2, one primary and one as a backup – define your strategy
Security
- Define your security architecture – authentication, authorization, role/entitlement management, governance and compliance
- What other regulatory compliance issues do you need to deal with – SOX, PCI, HIPAA, ISOXXXX etc
This is not comprehensive, but helps me start thinking in the right direction…
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