A cloud computing system includes a plurality of tenants that are permitted to access cloud hosted applications. The system includes an input governance layer associated with each application, and an output governance layer associated with each application. The input governance layer and the output governance layer include an encapsulation of a cloud hosted application. The governance layers receive a request from a tenant-user to access a first application on the cloud computing system, check a governance database to determine if the tenant-user is authorized to access the first application, and allows or denies access accordingly.