I’m often accused of being pedantic. This isn’t something new – my brother used to call me “Perry Precise”, and would intentionally say things incorrectly to set me off. So maybe it’s not all my fault? 

My day job is writing about Microsoft technology – primarily Microsoft’s identity and systems management servers and services. But I also write about licensing, and co-present our Microsoft Licensing Boot Camps every other month, around the country and once per year in London. A side effect of working around licensing – and having to understand, process, and restate Microsoft’s ever-changing licensing rules to help bring our mutual customers up to speed, is that you learn that accuracy counts.

After the debate over “on-premises” vs. “on-premise” (the first one is correct), the next linguistic debate I often wind up having with people is the misuse of the word “tenant”, as in “log in to your Office 365 tenant”, or “run the code in your Azure tenant”.

The correct word to use in both of the above cases is “tenancy”. In fact, when most people use the word tenant to describe anything related to cloud services, I contend that they actually mean tenancy, but probably don’t know (or perhaps don’t care) about the difference. But I contend that it’s important that you know the difference – and I’ll explain why shortly.

This whole issue comes about because of the boom of “multi-tenant” services (yes, tenant is correct in that case) that effectively enabled what we know of today as cloud. Let me explain a bit of detail. Let’s start with three definitions, abstracted away from tech:

• Tenant: Bob, who owns a lease on a single apartment (unit) in an apartment complex.
• Multi-tenant: An apartment complex capable of hosting multiple individual, isolated tenants (Bob, his neighbor Alice… you get the idea).
• Tenancy: This is actually two things. First, this is Bob’s presence in the apartment complex – his actual residence – occupancy – as a tenant. Second, it’s the duration of Bob’s residence in the apartment. If his lease is up on September 1, and he doesn’t renew, both aspects of Bob’s tenancy will end.

If after reading the above definitions, it isn’t clear, try this – whenever you read the word tenant, replace it with “occupant”. Whenever you read the word tenancy, replace it with “occupancy”. The two sets of words are not technically exact synonyms with each other – but they’re close enough that the difference might feel less subtle.

So let’s take the definitions above and apply them to Microsoft’s cloud services, like Azure Active Directory (AAD) for identity, Office 365 hosted services, and Azure. AAD is used for identity across Microsoft’s services, so every organization using those services is using it, whether or not they realize it. Let’s imagine a hypothetical bicycle shop, called AdventureWorks Cycles. AdventureWorks has 50 employees, and they’re using Office 365 and Azure.

• Tenant: AdventureWorks Cycles is the tenant.
• Tenancy: AdventureWorks has tenancies of AAD, Azure, and Office 365. (AAD in turn is used by Azure and Office 365).

Microsoft in particular often uses the term “tenant admin” to describe the individual(s) who would perform administration on an organization’s tenancy of Microsoft services. This becomes weird for a couple of reasons.

Let’s say Carol works for AdventureWorks and manages their Azure tenancy. Carol brings in an outside contractor, Ted, who doesn’t work for AdventureWorks, but is employed by an outside consulting company. Technically, we can see here that the term tenant admin actually doesn’t even work at all. We could at best say Carol is the tenant’s admin, but that’s about it. Otherwise, both Carol and Ted are actually – you guessed it – tenancy admins. (Try my occupant/occupancy exercise again here, if this isn’t clear.)

So why does all this matter? When you start talking about migration, or collaboration between organizations or between component organizations within a larger organization, or when you’re discussing licensing in particular, it can get crazy confusing if you’re overloading tenant with meaning everything. If you’ve got a large organization (tenant) with multiple fractured tenancies each of AAD and Office 365 or Azure, trying to describe the moving parts for getting two or more split business divisions back together can quickly start to look like an Abbott and Costello sketch.

So how did we get here? How did tenant become the generic word across all of these meanings? Like on-premise (shudder), I think that tenant winds up being used in the examples I’ve given, for four reasons, loosely in order of likelihood:

1. The architectural model used to host multiple organizations (tenants) is generally referred to as “multi-tenant” (with other possible variations including – technically incorrect – “multitenant” as one word).
2. I think that tenant – let alone tenancy – just isn’t a word that is/was commonly used in English – at least in US English. As such, when tenant became so commonly used as a part of the multi-tenant concept, “tenant” just became the default subcomponent descriptor to describe the renting organization’s deployment of the software itself, incorrect or not.
3. The organizations building these kinds of systems build the system and sell the functionality – unintentionally using the wrong word repeatedly themselves. (This is something Microsoft has definitely contributed negatively to in this case, and still seems to use tenant more frequently than not.)
4. I think there may be something linguistically going on here too – like the nuanced difference between the words might get lost because the concept doesn’t translate, or doesn’t translate exactly the same, from English.

As always, if you have feedback on this or any post of mine, you can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/getwired.

Image license: CC0