Microsoft Entra tenant
What it is
A Microsoft Entra tenant is an organization’s dedicated identity directory in Microsoft Entra ID. It contains identities and directory settings, including users, groups, applications, and devices. Think of it as Northwind’s sign-in directory, not as the folder that holds its Azure servers or invoices.
Why it exists
Because Azure is shared infrastructure, each org needs an isolated directory where its identities live and are managed. The tenant defines the trust and isolation boundary — identities, data and settings in one tenant are isolated from others.
How it relates to Azure
- Each Azure subscription trusts one Entra tenant at a time. The tenant supplies the identities; Azure RBAC assignments decide what those identities may do in the subscription.
- One tenant can be associated with many subscriptions and one management-group hierarchy.
- Tenants are isolated by default, but organizations can configure collaboration and cross-tenant access. That does not merge their directories into one tenant.
Northwind example
Maya creates users for Luis and Priya, an Orders deployers group, and an application identity in Northwind’s tenant. The production subscription trusts that tenant. A role assignment then lets the deployers group manage only the ordering resource group. The tenant proves and manages identities; the subscription holds the resources and billing boundary.
Common confusion
- A tenant is not a subscription, management group, resource group, Azure region, or DNS domain for an application.
- Signing in successfully proves identity; it does not by itself grant Azure-resource access.
- “Azure AD” is the former name for Microsoft Entra ID. Older documentation and exam material may use either name.
How it fits (diagram)
Where it appears in the route
Use this entry with entraid, rbac, and azure-management-hierarchy before configuring people or workload identities.
Related
entraid · subscription · user-account · management-groups · rbac · northwind-traders-case-study
📘 Source: Microsoft Learn — What is Microsoft Entra ID?, checked 2026-09-16.