A tenant is your own, isolated environment within a cloud service such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace: all the users, mailboxes, files, settings and security rules of your organisation together. Every organisation has one tenant, tied to its own domain name.
Tenant in practice
The tenant is therefore the foundation of your digital workplace — and the most important asset to keep in your own hands. An organisation that does not itself hold the highest administrator rights (global admin) on its own tenant depends on an external party for every change. When parting ways with an IT supplier, that is exactly the point where handovers get stuck.
So check periodically: is the tenant registered in your own organisation's name, who has administrator rights, and are the domain registration and DNS under your own control? What a switch involves is covered in Switching IT partners.
Related terms
- SSO — SSO (single sign-on) means employees log in once — usually with their Microsoft or Google account — and automatically get access to all connected applications.
- Conditional access — Conditional access is a security mechanism that assesses per login attempt whether it is allowed, blocked or asked for extra verification — based on who is logging in, from which device, from which location and with what risk.
- DNS — DNS (Domain Name System) is the system that translates domain names into the servers behind them: it determines where your website is loaded and where email for your domain is delivered.
- SaaS — SaaS (Software as a Service) is software you use over the internet and pay for per user or per month, without running servers yourself — think Microsoft 365, Exact Online, Shopify or your ATS.