220-1101 Question 383
Single answerMultitenancyA small medical office is moving from locally hosted email to a cloud-based email service. The office manager wants to reduce costs by sharing the provider's infrastructure with other customers, but she is concerned that another company's users could access the clinic's mailboxes or data. Which cloud characteristic best addresses her concern while still allowing the provider to host many customers on the same platform?
- A
Multitenancy with logical isolation between tenants
- B
Local virtualization with a dedicated hypervisor for each user
- C
Single-tenant hosting where each customer shares the same mailbox database
- D
Ad hoc networking with client-to-client permissions
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is multitenancy with logical isolation between tenants. In cloud computing, multitenancy allows multiple organizations to use the same underlying infrastructure or application while keeping their data, identities, and configurations separated through logical controls. For A+ Core 1, candidates should understand multitenancy as a common cloud concept that improves efficiency and lowers costs without requiring each customer to have completely separate physical hardware. Best practices in major cloud and SaaS platforms rely on tenant isolation through authentication, authorization, encryption, and provider-side access controls rather than physical separation for every customer. This makes multitenancy the most practical and accurate answer for a business adopting shared cloud email services.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Multitenancy means a cloud provider can serve multiple customers (tenants) from shared infrastructure while using logical separation, permissions, and access controls to keep each tenant's data isolated. This is the core concept that allows cost savings without exposing one customer's data to another customer.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Virtualization is related to sharing hardware resources, but 'a dedicated hypervisor for each user' is not how cloud email services are typically deployed, and it does not describe the tenant-level separation the manager is asking about. The concern here is customer-to-customer data isolation in a shared cloud service, which is addressed by multitenancy controls.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Single-tenant hosting generally means one customer has dedicated resources or an isolated instance, not that customers share the same mailbox database. This option mixes concepts and does not describe the cost-saving shared-platform model requested in the scenario.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Ad hoc networking is a peer-to-peer wireless networking concept and has nothing to do with how cloud providers isolate customer data in hosted email platforms. Someone might choose this if they confuse general access permissions with cloud tenancy design.