• Lower operating costs – efficiencies and economies of scale are gained by utilizing shared resources for servers, databases, network infrastructure and telephony resources.
• Reduced cost and ease of on-boarding – vendors use the established framework, configurations and rules to quickly provision new tenants. Additionally, vendors can reduce on-boarding costs by granting self-service privileges to tenants so that they can handle administration of the solution themselves, without impacting other clients.
• Simplified system updates and roll-out of new functionality – code fixes, updates and new features/functionalities can be applied to the entire environment at one time. (This streamlines and reduces operating costs for vendors.) In this case, each tenant can elect to adopt and use the new features or to stay with what they have until they are ready for the new capabilities, which is an industry best practice for cloud-based contact center infrastructure vendors.
• System reliability and redundancy – vendors can cost-effectively build and maintain resilient, fault-tolerant “n+1” environments. They typically use virtualization technologies to give tenants access to redundant instances of applications and resources (servers, storage, networks and operating systems), so if a server or application fails, a service can be quickly moved to another virtual instance with limited downtime or data loss.

For years, cloud-based contact center infrastructure vendors told end users that they shouldn’t pay attention to the underlying architecture of their solutions. But this isn’t true. End users need to examine and understand their cloud-based solutions provider’s underlying architecture and infrastructure because it impacts what they can do, the speed at which it can be done, system costs and overall reliability. A true multi-tenant architecture delivers the following benefits to end users:

1. Full administrative control – each tenant has full control over their own environment, allowing them to manage, configure and change it without vendor involvement or assistance. This allows tenants to operate independently, at their own pace, and within their own schedules.
2. Data flexibility – each tenant retains full ownership of their data without concerns of the data being exposed, accessed or compromised by other clients. Because individual database instances are used, data can be easily imported and exported.
3. Dynamic and timely scalability – due to the use of shared resources, tenants can easily scale their environments up and down without having to deal with hardware requirements.
4. Speed of innovation and upgrades – end users can take advantage of new features without changing their operating environment; however, they still need to train their staff to use the new capabilities.