B2B multitenancy in Tesseral

What is multitenancy?

Consider the calculator app on your phone. It doesn’t really store any data. It doesn’t need to support multiple users. It’s a pretty simple app that just handles arithmetic for you.

Most web-based software is more complicated than that. Loosely speaking, users of web-based software will interact with the same application, which runs on shared cloud infrastructure. Again loosely speaking, that means users’ data inhabits in the same database.

A software application can’t generally show all of its data to just anyone. Imagine a chat application; messages exchanged between Alice and Bob likely should not be available to a third user, Eve.

Software applications therefore usually implement multitenant logical isolation, using software-defined rules that scope users’ access to certain data or functionality.

The main multitenancy models in cloud software

Not all multitenancy models work the same way. Two main archetypes of multitenancy characterize cloud software applications:

1. Consumer (B2C) multitenancy
2. Enterprise (B2B) multitenancy

Consumer (B2C) multitenancy

Consumer (B2C) multitenancy generally characterizes cloud software applications used by individuals. Familiar examples of such applications might include:

• Social media like Reddit or Pinterest
• Ecommerce websites like Etsy or Brooklinen
• Video games like Chess.com or Geoguessr

Software using the B2C multitenancy model implements tenancy boundaries around individual users. The software considers each user itself to be a tenant. Settings, permissions, and other data belong to the individual user.

Enterprise (B2B) multitenancy

Enterprise (B2B) multitenancy characterizes cloud software applications used by businesses or similar organizations (e.g., schools); we usually just call this kind of software “B2B SaaS.” Familiar examples might include:

• Human resources software like Workday or Paylocity
• Collaboration software like Slack or Asana
• Technical software like Datadog or Hashicorp

In B2B SaaS, users belong to organizations. For example, if a human resources manager at Southwest Airlines signs into Workday, he signs in as a member of the Southwest Airlines organization. If he leaves Southwest to begin a new job at Best Buy, he will need a new Workday account that represents his employment at Best Buy.

In this sense, the organization is the first-class tenant, not the user.

This matters greatly for a few reasons, including:

1. The organization receives the bill for services. For example, if a B2B SaaS charges for seat-based licenses, it needs a way to aggregate charges at the organization level.
2. Users within an organization change all the time. For example, companies frequently hire new and part ways with employees.
3. Organizations usually wish to implement policies that apply to all users. For example, an IT team may wish to require single sign-on.
4. Users may have different roles within an organization. For example, an organization may have admin users.

Business software nearly always requires this form of multitenancy.

How multitenancy works in Tesseral

Tesseral always uses the enterprise (B2B) multitenancy model. In Tesseral, users always belong to organizations. Users cannot exist outside an organization.

Note that organizations do not need to have multiple users. To accommodate individual users — as in the consumer (B2C) multitenancy model — you may create organizations that simply have one user.