Azure Subscription Migration from one Tenant to another

Hello, In this article i will discuss about the basics of Azure Tenant and Azure Subscriptions, We will basically see what's the difference and how can a subscription be transferred from one Azure tenant to another.

Azure Tenant

• Definition: An Azure Tenant is a dedicated instance of Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) for your organization.

• Purpose: It manages identity and access. All users, groups, and app registrations are created and managed in the tenant.

• Scope:

  • Represents the organization in Microsoft cloud services.

  • Used across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, etc.

• Example: contoso.onmicrosoft.com

Key Points:

• Each Microsoft Entra tenant is globally unique.

• You sign in to Azure using an account that belongs to a tenant.

• A tenant can have multiple subscriptions.

Azure Subscription

• Definition: An Azure Subscription is a container for Azure resources like VMs, databases, storage accounts, etc.

• Purpose: It is used for billing and resource management.

• Scope:

  • Linked to a single Entra tenant (identity boundary).

  • Each subscription has its own billing/accounting.

  • Resource access is controlled using RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) within the subscription.

Key Points:

• A tenant can contain multiple subscriptions.

• A subscription can only belong to one tenant.

• You can use different subscriptions to isolate environments (e.g., Dev/Test/Prod).

Lets now understand this using an example, Now a days people are buying subscription for various OTT platforms and apps, all these subscriptions are linked to an email account which is used for authentication on the respective platforms. There can be many OTT subscriptions purchased under the same email accounts. In a similar way a Azure Tenant has identities and subscription linked to the tenant can be used using the account which is created on the tenant.

Let's now see how a subscription can be migrated from one Azure tenant to another