
A respected SME, a printing company from the canton of Obwalden with 30 employees, loses all data – including backups – due to the mistake of an external service provider. The damage: over 750,000 CHF. The company is now history, and in March, bankruptcy was filed citing this incident.
The case made headlines in the press because, according to reports, the devastating damage was caused by an IT issue that should never have occurred in the first place. The causes were too fundamental and too obvious to be accepted as an acceptable risk.
This demonstrates how severe the consequences of inadequately secured IT processes can be. Especially in industries where IT infrastructures and IT workflows are not considered core competencies essential for production, such risks are not easy to recognize and avoid.
Such risks and incidents are not just IT problems. In today's world, they affect the fundamental substance of every company.
Read more: Keeping IT Risks Under Control – Before Your Company Faces a Crisis

Remote states are a powerful tool for controlled information sharing across teams and tenants. Especially in complex cloud environments with multiple areas of responsibility, they enable transparency, reusability and scalability. At the same time, they pose risks: faulty states, access issues and unresolved dependencies can compromise the stability of the entire infrastructure. This article demonstrates how to avoid these challenges and how to lay the foundation for reliable, automated infrastructure through clear structures and proven practices.
Read more: Terraform @ Scale - Part 1d: Pitfalls and Best Practices in Multi-Tenant Environments

Through a combination of carefully structured remote backends, thoughtful output design, and targeted use of the terraform_remote_state data source, you can establish a controlled information flow between different tenant levels - all without compromising the isolation of individual tenants.
Effectively using remote state for information exchange between organizational units requires a well-thought-out configuration of the Terraform environment. Central to this is the selection and setup of a suitable storage backend for storing state data in what are known as state files.
Read more: Terraform @ Scale - Part 1c: Practical Implementation of Remote State Data Flows

In the previous part of this series, we explained the basics of the remote state concept in Terraform and how it can be used for information inheritance in multi-tenancy environments. Now we will illustrate this with a concrete architectural example.

Scaling Terraform across organizational boundaries requires a careful balance between standardization and flexibility. With clear team structures, well-thought-out governance, automated CI/CD processes, and appropriate tooling support, even complex multi-tenant infrastructures can be effectively managed. With this foundation, you can expand your Terraform practice from individual teams to the entire organization while ensuring consistency, security, and efficiency.
This is the first part of a series on designing multi-tenancy as Infrastructure-as-Code in large-scale infrastructures.
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- Terraform for Enterprises: Understanding Modern Infrastructure Provisioning, or Lessons from a $460M Mistake