[signal11]

You can create a personal account with Azure or Microsoft more generically with your work email address, eg [e-mail]. Because this was set up by you, you could conceivably change it to [e-mail].

However your organization may then do a deal with MS for Azure, or MSDN subscriptions, etc. And they’ll issue a login with the same email* address [e-mail] — you now have two accounts tied to the same email, one which you created by yourself and one which your IT department created for you. There’s no way for you to change this second one. Typically authentication for the second one will happen via your org’s single sign on.

So the answer to “is this account personal or issued by your IT dept” really means — did you create the account yourself? Or was it provisioned for you by IT?

* Many orgs by default don’t use email to log in. Instead a “username” like jsmith is used instead. However while interfacing with Azure it seems to be a best practice to use email.

[hunter2_]

And some B2B+B2C SaaS products (Box/Dropbox/etc), when encountering this situation, only let 1 account exist. When the IT department tries to provision a conflict, instead of being provisioned, the personal account goes into an "invited to assimilate" status. The end user gets an email asking them to allow their account, which was created personally, to be converted to one managed by the enterprise admin. The user gets an opportunity, before the IT admin has control, to migrate personal data out (if they want the account converted) or change the email address to something that wouldn't conflict (if they want 2 accounts).