Multi-Tenancy & Cells as Unified File Management Infrastructure

Do You Need Purpose-Built Multi-Tenant Infrastructure?

If you're managing file access for more than one business unit, client, or regional entity, the answer is almost certainly yes. Pydio Cells is a self-hosted platform with first-class multi-tenancy built into its architecture, not layered on top of it, so a single deployment can securely serve multiple tenants without duplicating infrastructure per tenant.

Advanced Multi-Tenancy Architecture

Here are a few of the ways we help you meet your multi-tenant infrastructure challenges:

• Isolation at the configuration, data, and identity layers: Cells v5 introduces first-class multi-tenancy, with each tenant isolated across configuration, data, and identity, so one tenant's users, permissions, and files are never visible or reachable from another tenant's context.
• Tenant routing built into the request layer: Incoming requests are routed to the correct tenant via a configurable tenant header, so a single Cells deployment can serve many tenants without standing up a new instance for each one.
• Unified workspace model per tenant: Within each tenant, the "Cells" workspace concept still organizes files, documents, and Pages under a single permission boundary, so tenant admins get the same granular access control your own IT team relies on.
• Stateless, cloud-native scaling: Cells pods carry no internal state of their own; every infrastructure dependency (database, cache, broker, object storage, secrets) can be delegated to a managed or operator-deployed service, and the Helm chart is the recommended way to run Cells at scale across a Kubernetes cluster.
• Independent identity per tenant: Each tenant can connect its own SAML, OIDC, or LDAP identity provider, so business units or client organizations keep their own authentication source of truth instead of being folded into a shared directory.
• Storage flexibility per tenant: Storage backends including local filesystem, S3-compatible object storage, Azure Blob, and Google Cloud Storage can be assigned per tenant, giving service providers the flexibility to meet each client's residency or cost requirements individually.
• Automated governance via Flows: Cells Flows can enforce metadata completion, apply classification rules, and trigger notifications inside each tenant independently, so governance doesn't have to be re-built by hand for every new tenant you onboard.
• Rebuilt metadata system (v5): Cells allows tenant admins to define custom metadata fields, controlling their order and whether they're usable as search criteria, without affecting how other tenants structure their own metadata.
• Data sovereignty by architecture: Self-hosted on-premises, in a private cloud, or in a sovereign regional cloud of your choice, for the platform and for every tenant on it. No US-based vendor, no CLOUD Act or PATRIOT Act exposure, no data residency ambiguity, regardless of how many tenants you're running.
• Analytics and compliance per tenant: Cells' dashboards, reporting, and compliance audit tools can be scoped to a single tenant, so admins and managers can report on their own environment without visibility into, or noise from, every other tenant on the instance.