Microsoft 365 Cloud Offerings - Subscription & Licenses - Part 1

Microsoft 365 Cloud Offerings - Elements of Hierarchy

Microsoft provides a hierarchy of organizations, subscriptions, licenses, and user accounts for consistent use of identities and billing across its cloud offerings:

1. Microsoft Office 365
2. Microsoft Azure
3. Microsoft Intune and the Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS)
4. Microsoft Dynamics 365

Microsoft 365 combines Office 365, EMS, and Windows 10 Enterprise into a single subscription and set of integrated services.

Element 1: Organization

• An organization represents a business entity that is using Microsoft cloud offerings.
• Organization is identified by one or more public Domain Name System (DNS) domain names, such as "contoso.com"
• The organization is a container for subscriptions.

Element 2: Subscriptions

• A subscription is an agreement with Microsoft to use one or more Microsoft cloud platforms or services. 
• Charges for the subscription accrue based on either a per-user license fee or on cloud-based resource consumption.

Cloud Offerings that use Subscription Fee Model - Per User License 

• Microsoft Software as a Service (SaaS)-based cloud offerings (Office 365, Intune/EMS, and Dynamics 365) 

Cloud Offerings that use Subscription Fee Model - Cloud Based Resource Consumption

• Microsoft's Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 

Trial Subscriptions

• You can also use a trial subscription for both the subscription model, but the subscription expires after a specific amount of time or consumption charges. 
• You can convert a trial subscription to a paid subscription.

Multiple Subscriptions

• Organizations can have multiple subscriptions for Microsoft's cloud offerings. 

Element 3 - Licenses

For Microsoft SaaS Cloud Offerings

1. A license allows a specific user account to use the services of the cloud offering. 
2. User is charged a fixed monthly fee as part of your subscription. 
3. Administrators assign licenses to individual user accounts in the subscription.
4. Example below:

For Microsoft PaaS Cloud Offerings

1. Software license are built into service pricing

For Microsoft IaaS Based VMs

1. Additional licenses are used to use the software or application installed on a virtual machine image might be required. 
2. Some virtual machine images have licensed versions of software installed and the cost is included in the per-minute rate for the server. 
3. Examples are the virtual machine images for SQL Server 2014 and SQL Server 2016.
4. Some virtual machine images have trial versions of applications installed and need additional software application licenses for use beyond the trial period. 
5. For example, the SharePoint Server 2016 Trial virtual machine image includes a trial version of SharePoint Server 2016 pre-installed. 
6. To continue using SharePoint Server 2016 after the trial expiration date, you must purchase a SharePoint Server 2016 license and client licenses from Microsoft. 
7. These charges are separate from the Azure subscription and the per-minute rate to run the virtual machine still applies.

Element 4 - User Accounts

1. User accounts for all of Microsoft's cloud offerings are stored in an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant, which contains user accounts and groups. 
2. An Azure AD tenant can be synchronized with your existing Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) accounts using Azure AD Connect, a Windows server-based service. This is known as directory synchronization.

Element 5 - Tenants

For Microsoft SaaS Cloud Offerings

• The tenant is the regional location that houses the servers providing cloud services
• For example, the Contoso Corporation chose the European region to host its Office 365, EMS, and Dynamics 365 tenants for the 15,000 workers in their Paris headquarters.

For Microsoft PaaS Cloud Services & IaaS Workload

• Tenancy in any Azure datacenter across the world.
• You specify the Azure datacenter, known as the location, when you create the Azure PaaS app or service or element of an IaaS workload.

Azure AD Tenant

• An Azure AD tenant is a specific instance of Azure AD containing accounts and groups. 
• Paid or trial subscriptions of Office 365, Dynamics 365, or Intune/EMS include a free Azure AD tenant. This Azure AD tenant does not include other Azure services and is not the same as an Azure trial or paid subscription.

Summary

1.  An organization identified by its public domain name.
2. An organization can have multiple subscriptions
3. A subscription can have multiple licenses
4. Licenses can be assigned to individual user accounts
5. User accounts are stored in an Azure AD tenant