While single-tenant (ST) solutions can provide marginally improved levels of control and customization, many modern businesses— especially those in the SMB space—find that the costs of monitoring, servicing, and deploying ST solutions tend to greatly outweigh the benefits. For businesses with robust IT infrastructures, this may not be an issue. But for businesses that would rather allocate resources toward strategic efforts, agility, and ease of future growth, multi-tenant is often the preferred choice.
Other areas where multi-tenant (MT) deployment excels include:
1. Security expertise
Most companies can’t afford to hire an entire team of highly experienced IT security specialists. In some regions, those skills may be hard to find in the available talent pool. Multi-tenant cloud deployment helps businesses leverage the continuous scrutiny of experts who are vigilant to new attack approaches.
2. Continuous upgrades
Cloud solutions help businesses stay modern without having to schedule big bang events every two to three years to pause and upgrade. Instead, bite-size updates are rolled out as they are released, making it easier to avoid changes that can break future upgrades. In addition, it’s easy to stay on top of changing regulations, even across multiple regions.
3. Control costs
Businesses can save on the costs that go towards staff, security, and paying for excess capacity for peak periods and space for full redundancy/back-up.
4. Agility
Because the solution is always modern, it will have the localizations needed to support growth and change for new regions. In addition, capacity for mergers or new branches can easily be adjusted.
5. Innovation
By freeing IT teams from maintenance tasks, they can focus on more strategic issues. With the elastic storage capacity provided by MT deployment, it becomes easier to capitalize on advanced technologies relying on large amounts of data, like the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Meanwhile, it becomes easier to test concepts without significant commitment or risk.
6. Platform as a service (PaaS)
MT architecture offers no code/low code tools so business users can create reports, personalize interfaces, and more without altering the code. Modern MT solutions provide tools to support extensibility and offer the ability to personalize without the backlash of cumbersome modifications.
7. Top-quality, sophisticated solution
For software to be viable in an MT environment, it must have met rigorous testing and quality control standards. Businesses can be confident that the solution has been and continues to be highly scrutinized.
8. Opportunity to streamline
An upgrade to an MT environment provides the ideal opportunity to adopt proven best practices and get away from processes that have prevailed simply because they have always been around. This is the chance to change attitudes, workflows, and priorities, whether they involve putting the customer at the center of the business or focusing on product innovation. Eliminating modifications helps keep teams focused on new accomplishments rather than preserving familiar methodology. It also provides discipline for the future, providing a barrier to add-on projects that could impact the ERP code.
9. Taking a first step toward digitalization
Many of the benefits brought by MT cloud deployment provide the basis for a long-term digital strategy and operational action plan. It’s the last major ERP implementation many businesses will ever need because it will continue to adapt as technology changes.
While industry analysts sometimes squabble over the pros and cons of single-tenant versus multi-tenant and many try to sit on the fence, ultimately there is a clear best choice for organizations that want to modernize their operations: multi-tenant deployment. Multi-tenant is the true cloud, the one that brings the benefits typically associated with cloud computing, such as vast storage, speed of implementation, and advanced security, whatever the size of your business.