Share This Article
The term “multi-tenancy” carries different connotations depending on your industry. In general, it’s used to describe multiple customers leveraging an application being run in a single environment. From a DevOps perspective, multi-tenancy means having the proper architecture/infrastructure to ensure that your application can support multiple customers without failure. Multi-tenancy for MSPs, however, carries a slightly different meaning.
What is Multi-tenancy for MSPs?
For MSPs, multi-tenancy means the ability to fully manage disparate client organizations from a single location. In a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-driven world, this means managing multiple clients using a single application, or even managing access to multiple applications for multiple clients from one platform.
Although multi-tenancy as a concept has existed for a while, multi-tenancy for MSPs is mostly a byproduct of the cloud era of IT. Back when an organization’s IT infrastructure was solely based on-prem, early MSPs needed to manually attend to clients’ needs onsite — even physically interacting with servers and other hardware as needed. Because of this, any time anything was awry with a client’s infrastructure, the MSP would need to come and fix it.
This “break-fix” model served as the backbone of MSP business practices for a time, but modern cloud resources have revolutionized the MSP industry, allowing for remote IT management techniques. Using these new tools, IT service providers have been able to leverage a multi-tenant management experience.
The benefits of this new approach are apparent: MSPs spend less time traveling in between client organizations, which means they have more time to bring on new clientele, ultimately meaning more profit. With multi-tenancy, MSPs can be even more effective by centralizing their clients’ management needs into a single location. The issue then becomes finding solutions that offer multi-tenancy for MSPs.
Examples of Multi-tenancy for MSPs
Many key tools in an MSP’s stack allow for multi-tenancy, some of which include:
- G Suite™
- Office 365™/Azure® Active Directory®
- Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools
However, out of all of the solutions MSPs leverage, directory services — a key tool for managing identities across an organization — have yet to offer multi-tenant options.
Many organization’s IT environments center around directory services like Microsoft® Active Directory (AD) for identity and access management. As such, many MSPs administer client AD instances on-prem. Having to tend to each client’s directory service mirrors the inefficiencies of the break-fix era of managed IT, and as such, is unappealing to many modern MSPs. What they need is a directory service that provides multi-tenancy as well as remote IAM to improve efficiency and uptime. Is there a solution available that can do so?
JumpCloud Directory-as-a-Service Multi-Tenant Portal (MTP)
JumpCloud® Directory-as-a-Service® is the first cloud directory service. It unifies user access to systems, applications, networks, and more under a single identity. From a client’s perspective, that means users implement one password for everything, resulting in fewer password resets and less time spent onboarding and offboarding for MSPs.
As a part of Directory-as-a-Service, JumpCloud offers MSPs the Multi-Tenant Portal (MTP) to fully manage their clients’ identities and access control across virtually all resources. That includes IAM for G Suite, O365, Azure, AWS, and more. MSPs can also use the JumpCloud MTP to enforce system security settings at scale, manage networks through RADIUS, and provide SSO to applications through SAML and cloud LDAP, all from a single pane of administrative glass.
Learn More
If you’re interested in true multi-tenant IAM for MSPs, then learn more about the JumpCloud Partner Program. We specialize in helping MSPs and other IT service providers expand their business with Directory-as-a-Service and the MTP, offering discounts, support, and co-marketing materials for those that become a JumpCloud Partner.
