Multiple Tenant Environments

Multi-tenancy provides the capability to support multiple customers or organizations (tenants) by using a single deployment of an application, while ensuring that each tenant can access only the data that they are authorized to use. Such applications are called multi-tenant applications. Multi-tenant applications minimize the extra costs associated with these environments. IBM® Cognos® Business Intelligence provides built-in multi-tenancy capabilities. Before you can use IBM Cognos multi-tenancy, you must modify configuration files in your IBM Cognos Business Intelligence installation.

The Business Intelligence multi-tenancy feature does not require you to perform additional administration tasks to manage tenants because it reuses your existing authentication infrastructure. When multi-tenancy is enabled, it does not affect how you currently manage your users and groups. To add, remove, or manage tenants, you use your existing authentication provider.

Objects within content manager can be associated to a particular tenant or be categorized as public. Public objects are visible by all users regardless of the user's tenancy if the object permissions permit access.

Tenancy checks during object access are evaluated before permissions associated with an object. Therefore, users in a multi-tenant enabled application only ever see the objects that are associated with their tenant and objects that are categorized as public.

After multi-tenancy is enabled, you can record tenant activities using an audit logging database. IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides sample audit reports that show how to use the tenancy information to monitor certain user activities. For more information about how to use Cognos configuration to set up a logging database, see the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Installation Guide and Configuration Guide.

For information about setting up the sample audit reports, see Sample Audit Model and Audit Reports.