This is a continuation in a series of articles on Multitenant Applications. The previous articles talked about tenant-to-tenant migration and this article talks about tenant management in that context.

One of the first tenant decisions is how many to have. Each tenant is distinct, unique, and separate from all other tenants. A single tenant is one that has a single Azure AD tenant, with a single set of accounts, groups, and policies. Permissions and sharing of resources are facilitated by this central identity provider. Multiple tenants are created when there is administrative isolation, decentralized IT, historical decisions, mergers, acquisitions or divestitures, clear separation of branding for a parent company, pre-production, test or sandbox tenants. Some restrictions apply in providing services to users and intertenant collaboration such as a central location for files, conversations, calendars etc. must be set up for users to collaborate more effectively.

Prior to cross-tenant migration such as for mailboxes, it was required to completely offboard a user mailbox from the current tenant to on-premises and onboard them to a new tenant. Cross-tenant migration allows administrators to move artifacts such as mailboxes with minimal dependencies in their on-premises systems.

A tenant allows a central location and one or more satellite locations to facilitate data residency in specific datacenters while the tenant information is mastered centrally and synchronized into each geo-location. When a new datacenter is added to a tenant in a new geo-location, it’s possible to migrate the organization’s core customer data at rest to the new location. Opening a new datacenter does not impact existing usages of the organization’s data.

The set of products and number of licenses for each requires some planning to ensure that there are enough licenses from the users’ accounts that need advanced features and that there are sufficient licenses but not too many unassigned licenses based on staffing.

A summary of the steps for tenant management includes how many tenants are there or needed, what products or licenses must be purchased for each tenant, whether a tenant needs to be multi-geo  to comply with data requirements, whether inter-tenant collaboration must be setup, whether one-tenant must be migrated to another and whether core data from one datacenter must be moved to a new one.