What is an Azure Tenant?

Azure Tenant is a unique identifier of an organization in Azure Active Directory. An Azure tenant is associated with a single identity (organization, company, or person). A single entity can have one or multiple subscriptions.

Azure Active Directory organizes all users into groups, known as tenants. Therefore, a tenant is a single dedicated instance of Azure AD that you receive upon establishing a relationship with Microsoft, such as by signing up for Azure or Microsoft 365.
Each tenant ID in Azure AD is unique from the other. A tenant houses all the users in an organization, including personal profiles, permissions, passwords, etc.

Azure gives each organization an Azure AD tenant. Within the tenant, it can purchase resources and create different subscriptions for the services.

Also Read: Why You Need to Migrate Your On-Premises IT to Azure Infrastructure

How Does It Work?

You can compare the Tenant model to an apartment with an apartment complex. Upon owning or renting a single apartment, you receive tenancy.

There are different tenants inside of the Microsoft cloud. You can have subscriptions, domains, groups, and users within a tenant. Ideally, a tenant becomes a logical security construct to allow you to start assigning different things like roles and security.

Understanding Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory is an identity and access management service for Azure that is in the cloud. It allows users to create identities and login credentials for users. It also allows admins to assign roles and permissions easily.

Azure AD helps authenticate all users, devices, and services for a subscription. Each Azure AD subscription comes with an associated tenant ID.

How to Create and Use Tenants in Azure?

To create an Azure Tenant, you need a subscription to Azure AD. By default, you acquire a tenant upon your subscription. You can either create a new tenant or use the default tenant. It’s always advisable to create a new Azure Tenant.

Open Azure AD, click “Manage Tenants,” and click “create.” Upon creating, click on “Next” then “Configuration.” provide all necessary details and proceed to “Review” and “Create.” Your Azure Tenant creation will then be complete in a few.

Once you have created a Tenant, you can proceed to create a user. On the left menu, click on “Users” and provide the user identity such as username, domain, and full names. Click in Role to assign roles to the created users.

At this point, you have an Azure Tenant and user. Always remember to save your password upon generating it. The password won’t display afterward, and you have to reset the password for that specific user.

Subscription in Azure

An Azure subscription is an entity used to provision resources. It holds a collection of resources used and billed together. An Azure subscription allows admins to access all resources with a subscription and provide role-based permissions.

Multiple subscriptions can tie to a tenant. Each subscription can fuel different sets of resources within a single tenant, and additional subscriptions can co-exist independently.

You can have multiple subscriptions that map to one tenant.

Here is a breakdown of how Azure AD, subscriptions, and tenants work:
• Each business entity in Azure can have many tenants
• An Azure AD tenant can have multiple subscriptions
• Each Azure AD tenant can have many accounts
• Multiple accounts can use multiple subscriptions
• Azure AD Tenant determines how accounts use subscriptions
• For billing purposes, you must tie Azure resources to a subscription

In the event that you have multiple subscriptions, such as Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and virtual machines running in Azure under different subscriptions, you can tie all of them to the same identity provider, the Azure Active Directory Tenant. Using the Azure Active Directory Tenant means that you are providing a single sign-on as well as the same username and password to access all the services.

Within that Azure Active Directory tenant, you can choose to link enterprise groups and users across different management groups under different resource groups as well as user roles. You can then determine which subscriptions to manage across those resources.

A subscription maps back to billing, and then a tenant maps back to individual resources that generate billing. In this case, you have the objects in the tenant, and those objects generate billing. Then, the billing goes back to a subscription.

The Bottom Line

There you have the ultimate guide to Azure Tenant. Azure Tenant attaches to an Azure AD account, and you can always access it through your Azure AD console.

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