Understanding Compliance Between Microsoft 365 Commercial, GCC, GCC-High and DoD Offerings

RichardWakeman: Thanks for your reply to Jonathan. We, as a partner, are running into scenarios where our manufacturing customers (primarily HQ'd in Michigan) are primarily focused on supporting the automotive sector (and in some cases, the aerospace sector) and may only have 50% or less of their overall business, employees, and/or data being impacted, in some capacity, under ITAR as a defense contractors. These aren't typically enterprise-size customers and typically fall into the SMC-C segment.

Due to the "limitations" on product availability and functionality within Office 365 GCC (including the lack of Office 365 GCC High in CSP today and added complexity of AOS-G (for less than 500 users) and EA (for more than 500 users)), we're continually running into the debate on what direction to advise them to go with: Office 365 GCC High, Office 365 GCC, Office 365 Commercial - and then, "all in" a specific tenant or the split-tenant model. As mentioned, the complexity comes in for the IT-led management and governance as well as the adoption and change management (including end-user awareness and training) headaches for 2 different tenant types with potential different configurations and product/service capabilities.

I'd be curious what your guidance is for these kind of customers and what your reference architectures are (just for awareness if they don't all apply to my referenced scenario). Thanks!