Active Directory, Entra ID and device migration

Performing an AD migration or consolidation with the right AD migration tool can help strengthen your AD security, centralize your domain management, and improve end user experience.  If your company currently maintains separate domains for different departments or regions, you can combine the domains to provide standardized management and security policies, while still maintaining the ability to provide granular access to the consolidated resources. 

Conversely, you might be managing multiple Active Directory domains because of a merger, acquisition, or divestiture.  Configuring integration between the domains can help provide coexistence by syncing passwords and providing cross-domain resource access, but this can result in increased risk and management effort.  If you are maintaining separate domains after a tenant-to-tenant migration, your end users might struggle with managing multiple identities.  You should always make sure Active Directory domain consolidation is part of your tenant-to-tenant migration discussions.

Active Directory is Microsoft’s original on-premises enterprise solution for organizing and managing a company’s resources such as users, groups, and devices.  Active Directory objects are configured within organizational units that belong to a domain, which can itself belong to another domain or forest.  Active Directory is managed by domain controllers, which can physically reside in a company office or data center or can run as virtual machines.  When users need to access resources and applications on Active Directory servers, they must have direct network access or connect to a virtual private network.

Entra ID fully resides in the cloud and removes the need for domain controllers, organizational units, and direct network access to physical servers.  Microsoft maintains the infrastructure for your Entra ID tenant, scaling up as needed to support your company’s tenant activity. Users, groups, devices, and other resources are created and managed in the tenant, and users only need Internet connectivity to access cloud resources. Microsoft Entra ID can also serve as an extension to Active Directory by enabling synchronization between the two environments, allowing users to authenticate to Active Directory for local resources while also having access to the cloud-only resources in Entra ID.

Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra ID tenants are complex cloud platforms that include many different components and resources. Microsoft supports tenant-to-tenant migrations for many of its individual workloads; however, you cannot migrate an entire tenant as-is, and there are many configurations and resources that must be directly configured in another tenant. 

When it comes to AD migration, Microsoft supports migrating Entra ID objects such as users, groups, contacts, guests, and Entra ID-joined devices from one tenant to another.  Microsoft also supports tenant-to-tenant migrations for Microsoft 365 content such as mailboxes, OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint.  You can use an AD migration tool to perform these migrations, enable cross-tenant coexistence, and replicate resource access.   Although there is no direct migration path for Azure applications, virtual servers, and most tenant policies and configurations, the Microsoft community has built a tool for exporting and importing many tenant settings to assist with your tenant migration, and a dedicated AD migration tool can help fill in the gaps.