Share via

How to transfer data across Tenants using Managed Identity authentication?

Narsimha Vangari (Capgemini America Inc) 0 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff
2025-04-29T02:24:23.73+00:00

Hi All,

I have a requirement to extract data from a source system in Tenant A to a target system in Tenant B. I have been granted Managed Identity (MI) access on the source. I'm using Azure Synapse Analytics to build the ETL pipeline for this data extraction.

However, I noticed that MI is not supported for cross-tenant authentication scenarios. I am aware that using a Service Principal (SPN) would work in such cases, but we prefer to avoid it due to credential management overhead and potential security alerts.

I’m reaching out to check if anyone has encountered a similar scenario and could suggest alternative approaches to achieve this cross-tenant data transfer securely.

Thank you for your help!

Thanks in Advance

Azure Synapse Analytics
Azure Synapse Analytics
An Azure analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. Previously known as Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
5,318 questions
0 comments

1 answer

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Nandan Hegde 35,026 Reputation points MVP
    2025-04-29T03:10:00.3633333+00:00

    Unfortunately, in case of cross tenant; the most secure way of authenticating is via Service principal only (and there is no alternative way based on my understanding)

    You can use Managed Identity to connect to the source/sink within the tenant in which the Synapse pipeline belongs but the other source/sink in another tenant must be accessed via the service principal or the Keys of the other aspects (like SQL auth for Database or Access keys/SAS URL for blobs which are not a secure way)

Your answer

Answers can be marked as Accepted Answers by the question author, which helps users to know the answer solved the author's problem.