The Challenge
Mazda Australia needed its national dealer network to securely access resources in the Mazda SharePoint Online tenant, without adding dealers as tenant members. Granting tenant membership to external parties introduced unacceptable risk around data exposure, licensing cost, and identity management at scale. At the same time, Mazda was running legacy on premises SharePoint infrastructure that needed a clear migration path to SharePoint Online.
What Evocate Delivered
Over 6 to 9 weeks, Evocate designed and implemented a secure cross tenant access architecture:
- Cross tenant access configuration using Microsoft Entra ID B2B collaboration, enabling dealer identities to authenticate against Mazda’s SharePoint resources with scoped permissions, no tenant membership required
- Dynamic security groups that automatically classified dealer users by region, role, and access tier, scaling permissions without manual group management
- Conditional Access and location restrictions enforcing MFA inheritance and geographic access controls across the dealer network
- SAML authentication to a Mazda provided application, extending the identity framework beyond SharePoint
- Pilot SharePoint migration from on premises to SharePoint Online, validating content fidelity, permissions mapping, and performance ahead of a broader rollout
- CIS Microsoft 365 Benchmark security review auditing the tenant against industry standard controls
- Full documentation and handover so Mazda’s internal IT team could operate and extend the solution independently
Outcomes
Mazda’s dealer network gained secure, governed access to SharePoint resources without the licensing overhead and security exposure of tenant membership. The dynamic group architecture eliminated manual dealer provisioning. New dealers are automatically classified and permissioned based on region and role. Conditional Access ensures access only occurs from trusted locations and devices. The pilot migration validated the path for Mazda’s broader on premises to cloud transition, and the CIS Benchmark review gave the security team a clear compliance baseline to maintain going forward.
Why This Matters
Cross tenant access is one of the most complex identity challenges in Microsoft 365. Most organisations either over provision (creating security risk) or under provision (driving users to shadow IT). Evocate’s solution for Mazda is a scalable pattern applicable to any organisation with a large external partner, dealer, or franchise network needing controlled access to corporate SharePoint resources.
