10 Critical Requirements for Environmental Cloud Applications: No. 1: True Multitenancy

We’ve been talking about the importance of multitenancy for more than a decade. As corporations start considering software budgets for 2026, there’s new interest in the topic of multitenancy and why it matters for EHS, ESG, and water data management. With that in mind, we’ve updated one of our earlier educational posts on the topic.

There is considerable debate in the marketplace about whether organizations should care about multitenancy. The truth is that multitenancy is the only proven SaaS delivery architecture that eliminates many of the problems created by the traditional software licensing and upgrade model, so it is extremely valuable to know whether a provider uses a multitenant architecture or something else. A provider should be able to answer this question with a simple “yes” or “no,” and prove its answer. Any vague or conditional responses are a clear indication that the answer is “no.”

Multitenancy ensures that every customer is on the same version of the software. As a result, no customer is left behind when the software is updated to include new features and innovations. A single software version also creates an unprecedented sense of community where customers and partners share knowledge, resources, and learning. Smart managers work with their peers and learn from them and what they are doing. Multitenancy offers distinct cost benefits over traditional, single-tenant software hosting. A multitenant SaaS provider’s resources are focused on maintaining a single, current version of the application, rather than spread out in an attempt to support multiple software versions for customers in parallel — a practice that isn’t sustainable, let alone efficient. If a provider isn’t using multitenancy, they may be hosting thousands of single-tenant customer implementations. Trying to maintain that is too costly for the vendor, and those costs, sooner or later, become the customers’ costs.

Multitenancy requires a new architectural approach. You have to develop applications from the ground up for multitenancy; otherwise, extensive work is required of the vendor to alter the on-premises application and underlying database for multitenancy, resulting in an even more complex, and potentially high-maintenance, application.