Who owns your Microsoft 365 tenant?

Your business should, and it is worth confirming rather than assuming. The tenant should be registered to your organisation, your domain should be registered in your name, and you should hold a global administrator account you control. Some providers set clients up inside arrangements that make leaving slow, and the time to discover that is not during a changeover.

This rarely comes from bad intent. In the early days of a relationship a provider registers the domain because it is faster than waiting for someone to find a credit card, and creates the tenant under their own management because that is the efficient path. Then years pass and nobody revisits it. The trouble only appears at the one moment you need control most: a changeover, a dispute, or a provider who has stopped answering the phone.

Three things to verify, and none takes long. The tenant is registered to your organisation, not held inside a partner-managed arrangement you cannot see. Your domain is registered in your business name with contact details you control, since the domain is your email and your website and losing it is losing your identity. And you hold a global administrator account, protected with multi-factor authentication, with credentials stored where your provider cannot reach them. That last one is a break-glass account, not a daily login.

None of this implies distrust of a good provider, and a good provider will hand it over without a pause, because it costs them nothing and it is plainly right. That is exactly what makes the request such a useful test. We set clients up owning their own tenant and domain with administrative access documented, on the view that a relationship should continue because it works rather than because leaving is difficult. If you cannot answer these three questions today, that is this week's email to your provider: 1800 456 567.