Picture yourself in the conference room, meeting with your IT people - things are going fine and then they say something...
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"Before the new accounts get provisioned we need to look over the tenant configuration, get backups pushing to immutable storage, and make sure DNS records are still clean." |
You nod, “sounds good"... no idea what just happened.
Don't worry, it's not your fault. The IT community loves acronyms and jargon, maybe not as much as some others (looking at you, healthcare people 😁), but they do love it. But here’s the thing - when you actually understand, you can make better decisions for your business. You ask better questions and you catch things that don’t sound right.
So we polled the crew in the bullpen downstairs and came up with what we think is a good chunk of lingo that we use pretty often, but might have left the folks we were chatting with nodding politely.
Tenant
When your IT provider says "tenant," they're referring to your organization's dedicated environment inside a cloud platform, most commonly Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Think of it like an apartment in a large building. Microsoft owns the building, but your tenant is your unit: your data, your users, your settings, completely separate from every other business on the same platform.
In plain English
"Your tenant" = your company's account and everything in it. When something goes wrong "in your tenant," it means inside your environment, not anyone else's.
API (Application Programming Interface)
An API is the behind-the-scenes connection that lets two software applications talk to each other and share information automatically. When your CRM updates a client record and your invoicing software reflects that change five seconds later without anyone touching it, that's an API doing its job. When it stops working, data stops syncing, and someone usually notices when numbers don't add up.
In plain English
"The API between your two systems broke" = your software tools stopped communicating, and someone's going to need to manually reconcile whatever they were supposed to share automatically.
On-Premises (On-Prem) vs. Cloud
On-premises means the server or software lives physically in your building, in a closet, a server room, or under someone's desk. Cloud means it lives in a data center somewhere else and you access it over the internet. Many businesses have a mix of both without fully realizing it: cloud email, but an on-prem accounting server from 2014 that nobody wants to touch.
In plain English
"That's still on-prem" = that system is running on hardware you own, in your building, and you're responsible for maintaining it (or paying someone to).
SaaS (Software as a Service)
SaaS is software you subscribe to rather than own. You pay monthly or annually, access it through a browser or app, and the company that makes it handles all updates and infrastructure. QuickBooks Online, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Dropbox: all SaaS. With SaaS, your data lives in someone else's system, which has implications for what happens if you cancel, if they get breached, or if the company shuts down.
In plain English
"That's a SaaS tool" = you're renting the software, not owning it. Make sure you know where your data lives and what happens to it if you ever leave.
Redundancy
Redundancy sounds like something is unnecessary or duplicated but here it's the opposite. Redundancy means having a backup system ready to take over automatically if the primary one fails. A redundant internet connection means if your main ISP goes down, a second kicks in and your team keeps working. Redundant power supplies, servers, backups are all intentional duplication designed to eliminate single points of failure.
In plain English
"We built redundancy into that system" = if one thing breaks, something else takes over automatically. Downtime is minimized or eliminated.
Provisioning / Deprovisioning
Provisioning means setting up access for someone - creating their accounts, assigning them to the right systems, giving them the tools they need. Deprovisioning is the reverse, removing that access when someone leaves or changes roles. Accounts that aren't properly deprovisioned are one of the most common ways former employees, or attackers who find those credentials, end up with access they shouldn't have.
In plain English
"We need to deprovision that account" = we need to turn off a former employee's access before it becomes a problem.
DNS (Domain Name System)
DNS is the internet's phone book. When you type a website address into your browser, DNS translates that human-readable name into the numerical address your computer needs to find the right server. It happens in milliseconds and you never notice it, until something goes wrong. DNS issues are behind a surprising number of "the website is down" and "email isn't delivering" problems.
In plain English
"It looks like a DNS issue" = the system that directs traffic to your website or email is misconfigured or broken. It's fixable, but corrections take time to spread across the internet.
Immutable
Immutable means something cannot be changed, modified, or deleted by anyone, including an administrator. You'll hear this most in backup conversations. Modern ransomware doesn't just encrypt your files, it actively looks for and destroys your backups so you have no option but to pay. Immutable backups are locked from any modification for a set period, meaning even if ransomware compromises your entire environment, it cannot touch those backups.
In plain English
"Your backups are immutable" = even if the worst happens, there's a copy of your data that nothing can delete or encrypt. That's your recovery option.
If you’re thinking “I wish someone had explained that years ago”, you’re not alone. These terms get used as shorthand in meetings where everyone assumes everyone else already knows what they mean. The result is a lot of nodding.
Helpful IT providers want you to ask questions. When you understand what’s being done to your systems, why it matters, and what the risks are of not doing it, you make better decisions.
This is eight terms out of what could easily be eighty. IT has a long tradition of making straightforward things sound complicated, and the glossary only gets longer from here. But if you walk away from your next IT meeting with everything making a little more sense, that's exactly what we were going for!