Understanding Azure Enterprise Portal: A Comprehensive Guide

Introduction

This blog provides a comprehensive guide to understanding the Azure enterprise portal, its features, roles, authentication options, managing departments and accounts, creating subscriptions, and more.

Overview of Azure Enterprise Portal

• The Azure enterprise portal, ea.azure.com, is the administrative site primarily used by enterprise administrators to set up departments, accounts, and subscriptions.

• It allows department administrators to manage their departments and the accounts and subscriptions within them.

• The enterprise portal is designed to help organizations in managing multiple accounts and subscriptions, grouping them into departments, and assigning administrators to manage them.

• The Azure portal, portal.azure.com, is where the technical side of Azure is managed, including deployments like virtual machines, websites, storage, and backup.

• There are four main roles that control access and management across the enterprise and Azure portals: Enterprise Administrator, Department Administrator, Account Owner, and Service Administrator.

• Each role has specific responsibilities, such as overseeing the entire Azure environment, managing department accounts, creating subscriptions, and controlling access within subscriptions.

• The Enterprise Administrator has access to all cost and usage data, while the Department Administrator oversees their department’s accounts and subscriptions based on the projects they are working on.

• The Account Owner is responsible for creating and overseeing subscriptions within their account, while the Service Administrator controls access and service creation within subscriptions.

• The Azure enterprise portal provides detailed enrollment and authentication features, including the ability to use Microsoft Accounts for login and out of the portal.

Understanding Enterprise Portal Authentication Options

• The authentication options for the enterprise portal include Microsoft accounts and work or school accounts.

• Microsoft accounts, which are managed by individual users outside of the company, are used for authentication, while work or school accounts are available in the cloud through Azure Active Directory (AAD) and are generally the preferred method as they are managed by the company.

• Different account types are available for configuration, including Microsoft account only, work or school only, mixed account, and work or school cross tenants.

• The Azure Marketplace, a store for third-party applications, can be enabled or disabled based on the need for additional services, and the charges for these services are invoiced separately.

• Department Admin and Account Owner view charges can be enabled to allow them to see the costs related to usage, providing transparency in financial information.

• Enterprise Administrators can be added to manage the authentication options, and notification contacts can also be added to receive notification emails.

• Adding departments allows for grouping accounts and subscriptions based on teams, units, or departments of the company, making reporting and access management more organized and efficient.

Managing Departments and Accounts in Azure Enterprise Portal

• The Azure Enterprise Portal provides a comprehensive view of the company’s spending on enterprise Azure, allowing users to isolate spending for specific departments over a period of time.

• Departments can be easily created with options to assign cost centers and spending quotas, which serve as notifications for spending limits, rather than hard caps.

• Department administrators oversee and manage accounts within their department, based on the projects they are working on.

• Accounts can be added to specific departments or left unassigned, with options to manage authentication type, account ownership, and cost center assignment.

• The account owner is responsible for managing subscriptions and overseeing the technical side of Azure deployments.

• Enterprise Dev/Test subscriptions can be created, but it’s important to note that they do not have production level SLA provided.

• Options to transfer subscriptions and change account owners are available for efficient management within the Azure Enterprise Portal.

Creating and Understanding Azure Subscriptions

• When creating a new subscription in Microsoft Azure, users can select different types, such as dev/test, enterprise, or pay-as-you-go.

• The Enterprise Dev/Test subscription offers Visual Studio subscriber rates and access to VM images not available to production subscriptions.

• Workloads running within the Enterprise Dev/Test subscription must be devoted to dev/test and are not backed by production SLAs.

• It’s important to run production workloads within the Microsoft Azure enterprise subscription, as it is designed for production-ready workloads.

• The subscription creation process involves confirming personal details and guiding users through the remaining options, including payment information and enterprise agreement acknowledgment.

• The subscription itself is a container for Azure services and does not have any cost associated with it until billable services are added.

• The reports page provides a breakdown of Azure commitment, monthly usage, cost against the commitment, and detailed usage information for further analysis.

Understanding Azure Enterprise Portal

• The Azure enterprise portal allows users to reconcile service prices each month with the usage detail file.

• It provides a price sheet listing every Azure service and rate, including negotiated discounts through enterprise agreements.

• Users can access their EA portal data and Power BI to analyze usage data through API access keys.

• The portal also enables subscription management, role-based access control, and access to technical support.

• Technical support is included for free with every Azure enterprise agreement, and users can engage support engineers through the portal.

Conclusion

Now that you have a comprehensive understanding of the Azure enterprise portal, its roles, and features, you can confidently navigate and utilize its capabilities for efficient management within your organization.

undefined