Like many other industries, education institutions have significantly ramped up cloud adoption in recent years. For example, Google Classroom gained 40 million users worldwide from 2020 to 2021, bringing its total user base to 150 million. Though cloud-based tools are helping institutions facilitate digital remote learning, institutions may not be getting the full value from their investments by operating with multi-tenant environments.
Multi-tenant scenarios create barriers that prevent seamless connection and collaboration between users, lead to data silos, and can drive up IT spending for institutions. Tech tools are certainly helping the education sector meet demand for modern learning approaches, but multi-tenant approaches might be the barrier hindering institutions from delivering an enhanced experience and inadvertently draining limited technology budgets.
The problem with multi-tenant scenarios
Multi-tenant environments weren’t always considered an issue. In fact, using multiple tenants likely wasn’t a significant problem when systems were first implemented in the education sector. It wasn’t abnormal for individual units within a school network to have their own tenant. Schools would establish one system for students, another for faculty, one for departments, and perhaps a fourth for staff and administrative groups. But separating these groups through a multi-tenant approach introduces more confusion on the front end and behind the scenes.
Today, multi-tenant environments can get in the way of the institution’s collaboration and productivity goals. Institutions that run on multi-tenant environments may also end up with more cloud resources than they need which can impede operations and lead to inefficient spending. Although security concerns remain a top priority for universities, most modern systems give MSPs and IT teams the ability to set and manage permissions with a high degree of customization and control within a single-tenant environment.
Brad Rosairo is BitTitan’s director of business development in the Asia Pacific and works to drive brand awareness and develop strategic channel and direct sales initiatives for the company in the APAC region. A seasoned sales professional with executive management experience, Brad has more than twenty years of background in executive business development.
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