When planning changes to your Azure setup, it’s important to understand what each action does. Moving billing ownership by itself doesn’t affect your Entra directory or your Azure DevOps organization, which means your repositories and Boards will stay the same. However, changing the subscription’s directory can remove important permissions like Azure RBAC assignments, custom roles, service principals, managed identities, Key Vault access, and pipeline service connections. This can cause issues with access and automation.
If you’re merging organizations, the best approach is to keep your current Azure DevOps organization as it is. Instead of trying to merge it directly, connect it to the target company’s Entra tenant. Microsoft does not support a direct organization merge, so this method is recommended. Before making any changes, ensure a team member with Project Collection Administrator permissions is in the target tenant. Then, export your user list, map identities correctly, invite any necessary guest users, and request support to clean up SSH keys if needed. Microsoft suggests reaching out to Support if you need to remap more than 100 users to avoid issues.
It’s also a good idea to pause deployments during this process to prevent disruptions. First, export your existing RBAC roles and service connection inventories. Afterwards, check that all users can sign in, verify group memberships, licenses, pipelines, agent pools, feeds, extensions, and federated credentials are working correctly.
If you’re only transferring billing information, you can leave the directory unchanged, and no other action is needed. But if you are changing the directory, make sure to re-create Azure roles and identity permissions before resuming production to keep everything running smoothly.