Azure billing offers and Active Directory tenants

This critical design area focuses on the two highest levels of alignment across all of your Azure deployments; your Azure billing offer and the association of that offer with a Microsoft Entra tenant.

Design area review

Involved roles or functions: This design area will likely require support from one or more of the following functions or roles to make decisions and implement those decisions: cloud strategy, cloud platform, and cloud center of excellence

Scope: The objective of this exercise is to evaluate the various offer types and Microsoft Entra tenant association is best suited for your overall environment.

Out of scope: This design area references Active Directory or AD, but it doesn't focus on the identity or management aspects of Microsoft Entra ID, only the tenant in which your identities will ultimately be hosted. That guidance will be reviewed in the identity and access management design area

Design area overview

The Azure service presents a range of active subscription offers, and customers can use these offers at the same time to gain flexible billing options. Example subscriptions include Enterprise Agreement (Enterprise Agreement), Microsoft customer agreement, cloud service provider, and others.

The Azure landing zone architecture supports subscriptions from any Azure offer. Subscriptions can only exist within one Microsoft Entra tenant to then relocate into the management group hierarchy within that tenant. They can then be managed by the various controls with enterprise-scale platforms like Azure Policy and role-based access control (RBAC).

Note

The Azure landing zone accelerator implementation is scoped and deployed to one Microsoft Entra tenant; however, billing options can span across multiple Microsoft Entra tenants. For example, an Enterprise Agreement enrollment supports Azure subscriptions across different Microsoft Entra tenants.

Explore the further information, considerations and recommendations for each approach below:

• Enterprise Agreement (EA)
• Microsoft customer agreement (MCA)
• Cloud solution provider agreement (CSP)
• Define a Microsoft Entra tenant