According to Microsoft, when Office 365 first rolled out several customers found out the hard way that being able to delete tenants from the account resulted in irreversible damage. In doing so, entire Office 365 deployments were shut down.
To protect customers from themselves, Microsoft turned off the ability to delete, in hopes that it could eventually be architected in a way where disaster could be minimized.
Microsoft has now released the functionality back into Azure after developing ways to ensure deletions won't actually create cataclysm. Provided in the Azure Management Portal, customers can now delete unneeded Cloud directories to help organize the environment.
The delete feature provides what you'd expect. It allows selections of directories and even includes a dummy box (Are you sure you want to do this?) to make ensure deletion is not selected by mistake. To provide even better deletion security a few criteria must be met.
Here's the list of check-and-balances to minimize mistakes:
- Must be a global administrator of the directory
- Home directories cannot be deleted by organizational accounts
- Directories with important resources cannot be deleted
- Directories with active subscriptions cannot be deleted
- A directory cannot be deleted if it contains more than one user
- No application can exist in the directory
