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Multi-Tenancy

A tenant is a complete, self-contained instance of the platform. Departments or organisations that must not see each other's users, applications or policies are kept apart as separate tenants rather than as groups inside one.

What a tenant owns

Each tenant has its own URL - https://<tenant>.instasafe.com - and, behind it, its own:

Users and user groups Provisioned locally or synced from that tenant's own directory
Applications and application groups Including their icons, landing pages and session controls
Gateways and controllers Declared in that tenant, with their own protected networks
Access policies Written against that tenant's users and applications
Authentication profiles That tenant's own directories and identity providers
Administrators A tenant administrator, and sub-admins with scoped rights
Logs and reports Sessions, access, events and audit records, held per tenant

Nothing in that list is shared. An administrator signs in to a tenant and sees only that tenant.

Each tenant brings its own identity source

Authentication is configured per tenant, not centrally. A tenant creates its own Active Directory, OpenLDAP, RADIUS, SAML, OAuth or OpenID profiles pointing at the servers that department runs - see Directory Queries and the Login Identifier and OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect Single Sign-On.

Users are then authenticated by the identity infrastructure configured for their own tenant. A department with its own Active Directory keeps using it; a department with a different identity provider uses that one. Two departments on the same platform need not share a directory, a provider, or a password policy.

The same applies to second factors: the MFA methods, risk profiles and session timeouts are tenant-level settings - see Configure MFA.

Administration is delegated, not pooled

Each tenant has its own administrator. Within a tenant, Sub Admins and Roles create further administrators with limited rights - a role is defined by what it may read or write across Users, Applications, ACLs, Controllers and Gateways, and a sub-admin is assigned that role.

So a department can administer its own users and applications without being given rights over another department's, and without rights over the tenant's own configuration.

Where tenant scoping shows up

Tenant identity is explicit in the platform's interfaces, not implied. When a gateway is registered it is given the tenant name taken from the tenant URL - see Create Gateways. The platform's API endpoints are addressed per tenant, as https://<tenant url>/console/... - see API based SSO. Where the platform publishes an LDAP interface, the tenant appears in the base DN as o=<tenant name> - see LDAP Authentication.

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