Office 365 Test/Dev Tenant guidance.

[Fernando Melo]

I am just wondering what you all do when you have production o365 environment and need a test/dev environment. 

Do you just isolate a dev site collection inside the prod tenant? do the SC app catalog?

Do you just sign up for trial tenants?
Do you just sign up for the developer tenant which is good for 1 year?

Or do you buy 1 or 2 licenses for e1-e5?

The reason i ask is that i am considering asking for funding for a 10 license e5 tenant for development. Since we deal with a lot of PHI, whatever solutions we build have to be hippa compliant, and i hate the fact that tenants mentioned above are just temporary.
Does anyone have an elegant solution for this?

Fernando

[#2]

Buy a few licences for a separate tenant and keep it up to date with changes made in production, realising that different tenants get updates at different times and so they will not always match.

If you are a Microsoft partner or MVP you can go to demos.microsoft.com for longer duration temporary tenants as well