Pros and cons of creating Multiple Subscriptions VS a Single Subscription

Question

_{Tuesday, February 26, 2019 8:24 AM}

What are the advantages and disadvantage of creating Multiple Subscriptions Vs a Single Subscription under on Azure Account?  

All replies (3)

_{Tuesday, February 26, 2019 10:02 AM ✅Answered | 2 votes}

Greetings,

Thanks for posting here.

Multiple Subscription Model:
In Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), a tenant is representative of an organization. It is a dedicated instance of the Azure AD service that an organization receives and owns when it signs up for a Microsoft cloud service such as Azure, Microsoft Intune, or Office 365. Each Azure AD tenant is distinct and separate from other Azure AD tenants
• An Azure tenant can have multiple subscriptions
• Each subscription can use the same Azure AD

Pros
• Multiple Subscriptions allow a company to easy view billing for each Subscription and limit who can access the Microsoft Azure services associated with that subscription
• Overcome any Azure limits and constraints
• Development and project team agility

Cons
• Complex
• Increased Management and costs
• Network circuits
• Edge gateway devices
• IP Address space
• Routing and firewall configurations
• Monitoring, patching and anti-virus for VMs
• Storage / Backup vaults

Single Subscription Model:
Single subscription under 1 Azure AD Tenant. You can segregate all servers and resources using VNets, Subnets, Firewalls, RBAC on Resource Groups.

Pros
• Easier Cost Control. Project based billing via Tags and Resource groups
• Centralized Operations
• Reuse of Shared infrastructure (Networking)

Cons
• Azure Limits and Constraints
• Less agility for development & project teams
• Requires more granular permission model (RBAC)

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Best regards

Subhash

_{Thursday, February 28, 2019 8:42 AM}

Hi , 

Just checking in if you have had a chance to see the previous response. If this answers your query, do click “Mark as Answer” and Up-Vote for the same.

Regards, 

Subhash.V

_{Sunday, October 27, 2019 8:30 PM}

I see Security as main driver for the use case Multiple Subscriptions, you did not mention that.

To reduce IAM complexity, i thought of avoiding using only one big subscription and many resource groups, it complicates things. It's more secure to have more subscriptions, each for different risk zones, if creates less space for configuration errors.

Using ARM template it would become easier to on board a new subscription, do you have any example to show this kind of architecture?