Move an Azure Subscription to a Different AD Directory

When managing multiple Azure AD and subscriptions, we need to create subscription on a particular Azure AD to grant access to the users in the directory. This allows us to prevent unauthorized access to other subscriptions. In some cases, we may want to transfer a subscription to a different AD directory. 

As of the time of this article, the new Azure portal does not enable this operation. In order to do that, we have to use the Azure AD portal and then load the Classic portal for the final transfers. Let’s see how that is done:

Transfer subscription to different directory

• Login with the account that has the subscription to aad.portal.azure.com

• Click on Azure Active Directory menu option

• Click on Classic Portal (top menu bar)

• On the Top-Right, select Subscriptions (ref image 1)

• Filter by the directory where the subscription is located

• Click on Manage subscription directory

• Select the subscription that we want to transfer

• Select on edit directory (bottom button - ref image 2)

• Select the target directory

• Click continue (right arrow) and make sure that there are no problems with users that do not exist on the target directory.  This means that the owner must exist on both directories.

• Click OK (Check mark)

image 1

image 2

The subscription should be moved to the new directory in a few minutes. After this is successful, we can log back in to Azure portal. We need to make sure that we select the correct directory from the top-right user profile component. There we can find a list of all the directories the user is associated with.

We can now load this URL. There is no menu option to load this view, so we can create a shortcut on the dashboard with this link.


https://portal.azure.com/#blade/Microsoft_Azure_Billing/SubscriptionsBlade

If we only click on the subscription menu option that it is available from the billing blade area, we see only the subscriptions with associated billing, and that filters our newly transferred subscription.

This should help us move our subscriptions to another AD directory without too much pain.

Originally published by ozkary.com