Harnessing Multitenancy: Empowering Insights with Embedded BI
As businesses increasingly rely on embedded BI to extract actionable insights from their data, understanding the underlying mechanics becomes vital. Bold BI’s multitenancy support streamlines tenant management and provides a secure, scalable, and flexible solution to the challenges organizations face when managing multiple clients or departments. This article explores how Bold BI’s multitenancy revolutionizes tenant management, empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions and improve their performance.
What is multitenancy?
Multitenancy is a software architecture where a single instance of an application serves multiple customers or tenants while keeping each tenant’s data and configuration isolated from others. Multitenant architecture optimizes resource utilization, with each tenant having its own dedicated data sources, user accounts, dashboards, and reports.
Why is multitenancy necessary?
Multitenancy offers several benefits in embedded analytics solutions, such as reduced costs, simplified management, and easier scalability as processing and memory resources are shared across multiple tenants. This architecture is commonly used in cloud computing for software as a service (SaaS) platforms, as well as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and content management systems (CMS).
Single tenant vs. multitenant
Bold BI’s multitenancy streamlines tenant management
Bold BI’s multitenancy is designed to streamline tenant management by supplying a comprehensive and efficient solution for managing multiple tenants within a single application. This includes:
- Centralized administration: Bold BI’s multitenancy feature allows administrators to manage all tenants from a single, centralized location. This makes it easy to create new tenants, manage existing ones, and check their usage and performance.
- Tenant isolation: Each tenant in Bold BI is isolated from the others, ensuring that data, users, and dashboards are kept separate and secure. This allows organizations to implement, maintain, and follow strict data privacy and security policies while providing a seamless user experience.
- Customization and branding: Bold BI allows organizations to customize the look and feel of the application for each tenant, including logos, colors, and themes. This enables businesses to provide a consistently branded experience for their clients.
- Scalability: Bold BI enables seamless onboarding of new tenants and the ability to handle increased data volumes and user traffic without disrupting existing tenants.
How to enable multitenancy in Bold BI
You can add a new tenant to the Bold BI application by creating a new site from the site administration module. Follow these steps to create another tenant in Bold BI:
- Initiate the site creation by clicking the Create Site button in the site management module as shown in the following image.
2. In the Site Creation tab, provide the details for tenant type, name, domain, and identifier The identifier should be unique and part of the site URL. Click Next.
3. In the Select Database section, select the Simple configuration tab which configures a single database for site metadata and data store. Provide the required credentials and click Next.
4. In the Select Storage section, choose the storage system for storing the resources of the dashboard server site and then click Next.
5. On the Data Security section, Configure Data Security details and then click Next.
6. Under the Administrator section, select a site administrator to control the site and then click Create and launch site. You will be taken to the Bold BI dashboard settings page.
7. The new site will be rendered as shown in the following image, and you’ll have access to multiple tenants in your Bold BI deployment.
Demystifying site management in Bold BI’s multitenant infrastructure
Bold BI includes a variety of features for administering sites under different tenants. These features include the following:
Rebranding
Rebranding creates a unique brand for each tenant. It enhances brand recognition and user engagement in Bold BI sites. It also enables businesses to provide their clients with a consistently branded experience. You can modify the organization name, header logo, favorite icon, email logo, time zone, and date time display formats. Check out this blog to learn more about rebranding in Bold BI.
In the following figure, we have changed the header logo for tenant two on the site:
In the following figure, the main tenant remains unbranded, producing a clear difference between the tenants:
Look and feel settings
Bold BI enables organizations to tailor the appearance of the application for each tenant, including its fonts and themes, providing a personalized user experience. By customizing the fonts and themes in each tenant, administrators can create a quality environment for each tenant. Admins can also create a custom theme as explained in this documentation.
In the scenario shown in the following image, we have changed the tenant theme.
Managing users
User management in a multitenant server environment involves isolating each tenant user in separate user management server instances. Administrators define roles and permissions for their organization, control user provisioning, and manage user accounts. Authentication methods like SSO are supported, allowing seamless integration with tenants’ identity providers. Effective user management in a multitenant environment ensures data security, facilitates collaboration, and enables organizations to maintain control over user access and privileges. User access can be granted or revoked as shown in the following figure:
Managing admin access
Admin access management in multitenant environments involves a super admin role that oversees the system settings. Each tenant has its own admin role with specific privileges, managing user provisioning and configurations within its instance. Role-based access control is implemented, allowing different admin roles and hierarchies to be assigned. The UMS logs admin activities, ensuring accountability and security. Secure authentication protocols and audit logs help monitor and track admin activities, ensuring data privacy and security. Admin access can be provided as shown in the following figure:
Managing localization
While Bold BI’s multitenancy feature allows administrators to manage all tenants from a single, centralized location, the users may come from diverse backgrounds. This can be a challenge considering linguistic and cultural context. By managing localization, organizations can provide a localized and personalized experience to users from different regions or with different language preferences. Localization enhances user satisfaction, engagement, and adoption of the analytics platform. Localization can be done in Bold BI as illustrated in the following figure:
Two-factor authentication
Activating two-factor authentication (2FA) in Bold BI enhances security by necessitating a time-sensitive, single-use password for every login. This additional step verifies the user’s identity and helps prevent unauthorized access. Bold BI’s 2FA works based on a TOTP algorithm that generates a new one-time password every 30 seconds based on the current time. Implementing 2FA strengthens the security of the analytics platform, protects sensitive data, and reduces the risk of unauthorized access or breaches in each tenant. This ensures that the user only accesses the tenants they are allowed to.
Row-level security
Row-level security in Bold BI restricts users’ access to specific data rows based on their role or organization, ensuring data privacy and security. The process involves data modeling, defining user attributes, creating security rules, designing reports, and controlling data access. Security rules are applied to data when a user logs in, allowing them access only to information they are authorized to view. This feature is essential in maintaining data privacy across different organizations or departments within a shared BI system. Check out this blog for more details.
Real-time use cases of multitenancy
In the education industry, multitenancy can be used to manage and analyze data from multiple campuses of a university, allowing administrators to monitor their campus’s performance and make data-driven decisions to improve the quality of education.
Central administration can use a higher-level tenant to aggregate data from all campuses to provide a holistic view of the university’s performance while ensuring data privacy and security. Our Higher Education Enrollment and Retention Dashboard example visualizes the important KPIs related to student enrollment and retention, collecting data from separate campuses of the university. In tenant one, which represents campus one, for example, the teacher-to-student ratio is 1 to 12 as shown in the following figure:
In tenant two, which represents campus two, the teacher-to-student ratio is 1 to 9 as shown in the following figure:
In this example, each campus has its own tenant while under one site that is administered by the university.
Conclusion
I hope you now have a much better understanding of multitenancy and its significance in Bold BI as the key to enabling organizations to leverage analytics as a value-added service for each client. Don’t miss the opportunity to enhance your analytics company-wide with Bold BI’s tenant management capabilities. Start a free trial of Bold BI now and experience the benefits for yourself.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on June 7, 2023.
