Read time: 6 minutes
Summary: Office 365 assigns tenant location during account creation based on the user’s region and IP address. You can find Office 365 tenant location via the Office 365 Admin Center or Graph PowerShell. However, if you change O365 tenant location, you’ll need to create a new tenant. To get your existing Microsoft tenant data into the new one, using a professional Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration tool is wise.
Office 365 is the go-to platform for all professionals. Users can utilize all its features to their maximum advantage. An Office 365 tenant is a part of the Office 365 organization that can manage all the services available in a particular Office 365 plan. There can be single or multiple tenants within an organization, and while creating one, you need to specify and verify a domain and choose a location for your tenant.
The default location of the tenant account is set up during the account creation. In this guide, we’ll show how to find Microsoft 365 tenant location via GUI-based and PowerShell methods, along with quick steps to change Office 365 tenant location. So, let us move ahead to find Microsoft 365 tenant location.
Why Knowing Office 365 Location Matters
Many organizations don’t pay attention to their Office 365 location while creating a tenant account which costs them several business and compliance challenges. Let’s understand with some real reasons to know the tenant location:
- Organizations may need to comply with regional data residency laws.
- Organizations may face issues during mergers and acquisitions.
- Some businesses experience service latency due to distant data centers.
- Usually, IT admins need to have location details during audit or security reviews.
Manual Ways to Find Office 365 Tenant Location
Office administrators can locate the geographical location of their Office 365 tenant by adopting the following manual techniques.
- Using Office 365 Admin Center
- Using Microsoft Graph PowerShell
Way 1: Find Office 365 Tenant Location via Admin Center
Admins find Office 365 admin center more familiar as it is a GUI-based method to find Microsoft 365 tenant location. Here are the steps to follow:
- Login to your Office 365 admin center, then go to Settings and click on Org Settings.
- On the Organization Profile, tap on the Data Location section and find the geographical location (for example, Europe) against each service available in your tenant separately.
- So, now the Office 365 tenant is located geographically. You can check for the tenant you want.
The method to locate the Office 365 tenant using interface options is not a complex one at all. There is another method as well to locate the Office 365 tenant, which involves running cmdlets in the Exchange Online PowerShell.
Way 2: Find Office 365 tenant Location via Microsoft Graph PowerShell
If you’re familiar enough with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell commands, then you can use this method to find Microsoft 365 tenant location. Here is the set of commands:
Step 1: Install Microsoft Graph PowerShell Module
The command below will install the Microsoft Graph module on the systems, and this module allows admins to connect with Microsoft 365 services.
Step 2: Connect to Microsoft Graph
The command below connects PowerShell to Microsoft Graph API. It opens up a Microsoft login window where you have to put your credentials.
Step 3: Retrieve Microsoft 365 tenant details
The command gives all the details of the respective account, and against the Organization ID section. You can find your account location in alphanumeric code, e.g., EURP193403, which can be taken as Europe.
Now that you know how to locate the Office 365 tenant location, let us move to the other aspect of this help blog, which is changing the existing Office 365 tenant location.
How to Change Office 365 Tenant Location or Region?
When you create a new Office 365 tenant account, it automatically checks the external IP that generated the request and provisions the tenant in that particular region. You cannot change the Office 365 tenant region as Microsoft has already created the specific instances for all workloads and also secured the required namespaces, which cannot be modified.
The only way to change the Office 365 tenant location is by creating a new Office 365 tenant on your desired location and migrating the data from the old Office 365 to it. So, we recommend you to create an Office 365 tenant first (at the desired location) and then use Kernel Office 365 Migration tool to perform the data migration between the two Office 365 tenants. With this tool, you can:
- Securely migrate Office 365 domains between two tenants in easy steps with only new and updated data (incremental migration).
- Migrate multiple mailboxes, public folders, or archived mailboxes and all their content, including emails, journals, contacts, attachments, and appointments, to another Office 365 tenant.
- Migrate shared mailboxes between Office 365 tenants, even bulk mailboxes migration via a CSV file.
Quick Steps to Change Office 365 Tenant Location:
- Create a new Microsoft 365 tenant in the required region.
- Perform Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration.
- Move mailboxes and all your workloads to the new tenant.
- Validate your data and then reconfigure domains and services.
Wrapping Up
A data center location is specified for every Office 365 tenant, and to know that location, users can pursue any of the two manual ways using Office 365 admin center or PowerShell. However, to change that Office 365 tenant location, you need to create a new tenant in the desired region. Once done, migrate the existing data from the old tenant using a reliable tenant-to-tenant migration tool.
