Microsoft Azure region classification can fall under one of the following categories:
- Azure CSP billing regions based on the information tied to the Azure AD tenant. These are the regions under which you can register an Azure tenant and based on which your end-customer will be billed. If for instance the customer wishes to be billed on a US-based company branch, they will have to provision an Azure AD tenant under the proper US region. For a detailed list of CSP Global Markets and regions, you can consult the following article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/regional-authorization-overview.
- Azure Resource Manager (ARM) resource regions based on the datacenter location where the Azure resources are hosted. Two or more regions can be grouped under an Azure geography, which coincides to a physical geography. More details on Azure geographies and regions can be found at: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/geographies/.
As a Microsoft Cloud Service Provider (CSP) you can come across potential customers who reside in your region but would like to be billed for Azure or Microsoft 365 services on a company branch located outside of your region. As of this writing, Microsoft does not allow CSP distributors or resellers to resell Microsoft Online services (Azure, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, etc) to any end-customer which resides outside of the CSP region in which the CSP reseller is registered. Also as a CSP reseller, you are not allowed to collaborate with any CSP distributor outside of your CSP region. For example, if you are a CSP reseller and you are registered in the European Union, you can only resell Microsoft CSP services to customers with Azure AD tenants registered within the European Union. In this case, if you have a customer who wishes to be billed to a company residing in the US, you cannot resell any CSP services to them, they will have to either use a US-based CSP reseller or use a Pay As You Go Azure subscription with direct billing from Microsoft. In the PAYG subscription case however, all pricing will be retail pricing.
Also note that if a customer wishes to change their billing address to one belonging to a different CSP region, they will need to perform an Azure or Microsoft 365 tenant to tenant migration.
When a customer purchases an Azure CSP subscription, they need to provide delegation to its CSP reseller and corresponding distributor by accepting the required Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA). In this case, CSP billing only ensures price protection for the Azure resources which are under Reserved Instances (RI). For all other pay as you go based resources, there is no price protection and prices may be changed by Microsoft in each monthly price catalog. Also bear in mind that all Azure price catalogs are now in USD. This means that for all countries with currency different than USD Azure prices are dependent on the exchange rate between USD and the country’s local currency. This can also bring small fluctuations in pricing.
