A Survey of Multi-Tenancy in Cloud Computing Environments

Enterprise IT infrastructures endure a wide range of costs including software and hardware costs. However, the advent of cloud computing environments have provided a tangible perspective for reduce some of these costs. Software as a Service (SaaS) is type of services that provided by the cloud. It provide a new paradigm, which goal is to provide an effective and intelligent way to support end users’ on-demand requirements to computing resources. In this regard, multitenancy is one of the most important features of SaaS tier that due to increasing rate of resource utilization and decreasing overall cost of IT infrastructure by IT organization have been considered. Because of the emerging nature of this concept and the advantages which is offered by it, study of characteristics, related concepts and its challenges are important. This paper first introduces Multi-tenancy, features and related concepts and then examine technical layers and variety of date management approaches in multi-tenancy architecture and finally offers multi-tenancy's challenges and existing solutions in order to resolve theirs challenges.