A cloud tenant is a customer, account, or workload operating inside a shared cloud platform with its own assigned resources, permissions, and policies. Tenants may share the same physical servers, accelerators, storage, and network, while remaining logically separated by the cloud provider.
In cyber security, the tenant model matters because attackers often do not need to break into the host to cause harm. A tenant with legitimate access can still abuse its allocated resources, overload shared services, or create noisy patterns that affect neighbors. Defenders monitor tenant behavior with quotas, isolation controls, telemetry, and anomaly detection to spot misuse such as credential abuse, resource exhaustion, and coordinated workload spikes. In advanced environments, tenant activity can also be tied to physical effects, including power draw and cooling pressure, so operators may enforce power envelopes and ramp-rate limits. The key idea is that “authorized” access is not always “safe” access in a shared cloud.