Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Multitenancy, Shared Data

Sharing of servers, application instances, and storage among customers represents a true and dramatic gain for most applications. A small business, on average, might use 1/100th or less of the power of a server on average; consequently, many of such businesses can be resident on a single multitenant architecture instead of each buying its own and achieving terrible utilization.

John Keagy, chief executive officer of GoGrid, one of the largest infrastructure as a service providers, has calculated that on average, Salesforce.com uses .03 servers per customer or perhaps fewer. This is compared to a typical minimum configuration that a customer might deploy itself of two or three servers. This represents more than a 65-fold improvement. Moreover, as Keagy pointed out, “think of how much more efficiently SalesForce.com manages these 3,000 servers than 100,000 random companies could manage more than 200,000 servers.”5

The same goes for storage: a small or medium business (SMB) with 1,000 customers, each needing a 1-kilobyte record—say, name, address, account balance—would use 1 megabyte—1 millionth of the capacity of the drive shipping with PCs today. And the space needed for other software components, rather than being replicated thousands of times for each of thousands of small businesses, can exist just once per location.