Pace one. Your Microsoft 365 for enterprise tenants

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One of your first tenant decisions is how many to have. Each Microsoft 365 tenant is distinct, unique, and split up from all other Microsoft 365 tenants. Its corresponding Azure AD tenant is also distinct, unique, and separate from all other Microsoft 365 tenants.

Single tenant

Having a single tenant simplifies many aspects of your organization's use of Microsoft 365. A unmarried tenant means a single Azure AD tenant with a single set of accounts, groups, and policies. Permissions and sharing of resources across your organization tin can exist washed through this central identity provider.

A single tenant provides the most characteristic-rich and simplified collaboration and productivity experience for your users.

Here is an example showing the default location and Azure Ad tenant of a Microsoft 365 tenant.

A single Microsoft 365 tenant with its Azure AD tenant.

Multiple tenants

There are many reasons why your organization could have multiple tenants:

  • Administrative isolation
  • Decentralized Information technology
  • Historical decisions
  • Mergers, acquisitions, or divestitures
  • Clear separation of branding for conglomerate organizations
  • Pre-production, test, or sandbox tenants

Here is an example of an organization that has two tenants (Tenant A and Tenant B) in the aforementioned default datacenter geo. Each tenant as a separate Azure AD tenant.

Multiple Microsoft 365 tenants with their own Azure AD tenants.

When you have multiple tenants, there are restrictions and additional considerations when managing them and providing services to your users.

Inter-tenant collaboration

If you desire your users to collaborate more than effectively across different Microsoft 365 tenants in a secure manner, inter-tenant collaboration options include using a central location for files and conversations, sharing calendars, using IM, audio/video calls for communication, and securing access to resource and applications.

For more information, see Microsoft 365 inter-tenant collaboration.

Cross-tenant mailbox migration (preview)

Prior to cross-tenant mailbox migration (in preview), when moving Exchange Online mailboxes between tenants, you accept to completely offboard a user mailbox from their electric current tenant (the source tenant) to on-premises and then onboard them to a new tenant (the target tenant). With the new cross-tenant mailbox migration feature, tenant administrators in both source and target tenants can move mailboxes between the tenants with minimal infrastructure dependencies in their on-premises systems. This removes the need to off-board and onboard mailboxes.

Hither are two instance tenants and their mailboxes before cantankerous-tenant mailbox migration.

Multiple Microsoft 365 tenants and their mailboxes.

In this illustration, two separate tenants accept their own domains and prepare of Exchange mailboxes.

Here is the target tenant (Tenant A) after cantankerous-tenant mailbox migration.

The target tenant after cross-tenant mailbox migration.

In this illustration, a unmarried tenant has both domains and both sets of Exchange mailboxes.

For more data, see Cross-tenant mailbox migration.

Tenant-to-tenant migrations

At that place are several architectural approaches for mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and other scenarios that might atomic number 82 you to migrate an existing Microsoft 365 tenant to a new tenant.

For detailed guidance, see Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migrations.

Multi-Geo for a tenant

With Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo, yous can provision and shop information at rest in the other datacenter geo locations that you've chosen to meet data residency requirements, and at the same time unlock your global rollout of modernistic productivity experiences to your workers.

In a Multi-Geo surroundings, your Microsoft 365 tenant consists of a default or central location where your Microsoft 365 subscription was originally created and ane or more satellite locations. In a multi-geo tenant, the data near geo locations, groups, and user information is mastered in a global Azure Advertising tenant. Considering your tenant information is mastered centrally and synchronized into each geo location, collaboration experiences involving anyone from your visitor are shared across the locations.

Here is an example of an organization that has its default location in Europe and a satellite location in North America. Both locations share the aforementioned global Azure AD tenant for the single Microsoft 365 tenant.

Example of a multi-geo Microsoft 365 tenant.

For more than information, encounter Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo.

Moving cadre information to a new datacenter geo

Microsoft continues to open up new datacenter geos for Microsoft 365 services. These new datacenter geos add capacity and compute resources to back up our ongoing customer demand and usage growth. Additionally, the new datacenter geos offer in-geo data residency for cadre client data.

Although opening a new datacenter geo does non impact you and your core information stored in an already existing datacenter geo, Microsoft allows y'all to request an early on migration of your system's core customer information at residual to a new datacenter geo.

Hither is an example in which a Microsoft 365 tenant was moved from the Eu (Eu) datacenter geo to the 1 located in the United Kingdom (U.k.).

Example of moving a Microsoft 365 tenant between datacenter geos.

For more than information, see Moving cadre data to new Microsoft 365 datacenter geos.

Products and licenses for a tenant

Your Microsoft 365 tenant gets created when you buy your commencement production, such equally Microsoft 365 E3. Along with the production are licenses, which are charged a monthly or almanac fee. An administrator then assigns an available license from one of your products to a user account, either directly or through group membership. Depending on your organisation'south business concern needs, you might have a prepare of products, each with their own pool of licenses.

Determining the set of products and the number of licenses for each requires some planning to:

  • Ensure you have plenty licenses for the user accounts that demand advanced features.
  • Preclude you from running out of licenses or having too many unassigned licenses, based on changes in staffing at your arrangement.

Results of Pace 1

For your Microsoft 365 for enterprise tenants, you accept determined:

  • How many tenants you have or need.
  • For each tenant, which products and licenses must be purchased.
  • Whether a tenant needs to be Multi-Geo to comply with data residency requirements.
  • Whether you demand to set up inter-tenant collaboration.
  • Whether y'all need to migrate one tenant to some other.
  • Whether you need to motion core data from one datacenter geo to new one.

Here is an example of a new tenant.

Example of a new tenant.

In this analogy, the tenant has:

  • A default location corresponding to a Microsoft 365 datacenter geo.
  • A prepare of products and licenses.
  • The set of cloud productivity apps, some of which are specific to products.
  • An Azure AD tenant that contains global ambassador accounts and an initial DNS domain name.

As nosotros move through the additional steps of this solution, we will build out this figure.

Ongoing maintenance for tenants

On an ongoing basis, you might need to:

  • Add a new tenant.
  • Add together new products to a tenant with an initial number of licenses.
  • Change the set of licenses for a product in a tenant to adjust for changing staff requirements.
  • Motility your core data from a tenant to a new datacenter geo location.
  • Add Multi-Geo for data residency requirements.
  • Set up inter-tenant collaboration.

Adjacent stride

Step 2. Optimize your tenant for network for access.

Continue with networking to provide optimal networking from your workers to Microsoft 365 cloud services.