Cloud & Infrastructure
Tenant
Your organization's isolated container within a cloud platform — your users, settings, and data in Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or similar.
A tenant is your organization's own dedicated space within a cloud provider's platform — your isolated instance of Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or similar, containing your users, settings, data, and domain. When people talk about "our Microsoft tenant" or "our Google tenant," they mean this container.
A key and frequently misunderstood point: having a tenant is not the same as paying for one. You can create both a Microsoft 365 / Azure tenant and a Google Workspace tenant at no cost — what costs money is the licenses you attach to users within them. Both providers offer free licensing tiers, and nonprofits in particular can access a great deal at no charge.
Creating a tenant and verifying your domain within it does two valuable things even if you never attach a paid license: it reserves your space so no one else can claim it, and it prevents others from impersonating your domain on that platform. There's a strong case for every organization to have both a Google and a Microsoft tenant.