In this guest blog post, Ivan Fioravanti, Chief Technology Officer at CoreView, considers the IT challenges of multi-tenant architectures and how enterprises can simplify tenant management.
Microsoft 365 is at the operational heart of many modern enterprises. Assuming that an enterprise’s data, information, and intellectual property are its brains, the tenants in which data live are its body. Powering collaboration, communication, and productivity across teams, Microsoft provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to secure environments and enhance cyber resilience. Yet even with these robust native capabilities, enterprises can encounter challenges when managing tenant complexity.
The tenant dilemma: Single or multi?
Organizational, geographic, compliance, and security factors often dictate tenant separation rather than technical limitations. For example, the chart below illustrates some reasons why an estimated 78% of organizations continue to manage multiple tenants, whether they want to or not:
Figure 1: Reasons enterprises maintain multiple tenants, as shared in the 2025 CoreView State of Microsoft 365 Security report
The complexity of managing multi-tenant structures with existing tools is crushing IT teams with challenges arising in the form of operational overhead, excessive costs, inconsistent configurations, identity management and access control issues, and data silos.
Organizations with complex needs often feel they have no response but to use a multi-tenant model as the only way to enforce least privilege, separation, and other concerns in Microsoft 365. And while regaining control via tenant consolidation seems attractive, the complexities of doing so, coupled with what appears on the surface to be a trade-off between security and productivity, renders many organizations inert.
Most organizations and their IT teams really do not want to manage multiple tenants – or at least would like to see multi-tenant management become easier and more straightforward.
The hidden disaster in plain sight: No tenant configuration backup
Once an enterprise has realized that they can choose to simplify their tenant management to adopt the structure that suits their business needs, they are faced by a second – and virtually invisible – challenge: tenant configuration backup.
While more than 96% of global organizations report having their critical data backed up, more than half mistakenly believe that their tenant configurations are also backed up. This is a security and business continuity disaster in the making.
While all of a company’s data may be on hand to restore after a disaster or attack, the loss of a tenant and its configurations (such as policies, permission settings, and user roles) means there is nowhere to restore it to, leaving organizations vulnerable to downtime and operational risks. How long would it take to restore a baseline after incidents if tenant configurations are not part of a standard backup routine?
Looking beyond native Microsoft 365 tools
While Microsoft 365 equips organizations with powerful security and compliance features, there are areas where complementary solutions augment what is natively available in Microsoft 365, including:
o Giving enterprises a choice between single and multi-tenant architectures to help manage tenant complexity securely without damaging productivity.
o Detecting configuration drift and inconsistencies as well as config tampering across multiple tenants.
o Backing up complete tenant configurations for rapid rollback or restoration, ensuring recovery and operational continuity in the event of misconfigurations, threats, or failures.
This is where CoreView comes in. Built for organizations that depend on Microsoft 365, CoreView transforms enterprise tenant management by providing unified visibility across all tenants, closing critical cyber resilience gaps, and simplifying complex tenant and configuration backup and management challenges.
CoreView addresses these gaps, offering solutions that allow enterprises to strengthen their Microsoft 365 environments and guard against tenant downtime and threats to their security posture.
Master Microsoft 365 tenant complexity and get enterprise tenant resilience
Microsoft 365 provides an exceptional foundation for enterprise productivity and security. Yet, as organizations scale and threats evolve, it’s critical to complement native tools with solutions that offer unified visibility, proactive risk management, and simplified tenant operations. CoreView offers these capabilities, helping master tenant complexity, back up tenant configurations, and identify and detect configuration drift early in order to operate productively and safely – and to recover quickly in the event of an incident.
With CoreView, managing Microsoft 365 is no longer about surviving complexity — it’s about mastering it and gaining cyber resilience.
