If you talk to the owner of such a business, one of their biggest fears is if an employee leaves the company and takes access to cloud services and information to a competitor. The old way of dealing with this was to set up new user accounts and passwords for users in each of those services. Many small-to-medium enterprises are discovering, thanks to replacing Exchange or Small Business Server with Office 365, that there is a real possibility of removing lots of other servers, such as CRM, accounting, and so on, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications from other vendors. You’ll find that the user names and passwords are already there - all thanks to one identity store, a logical AD that is made up of your on-premises AD and Azure AD.Īzure AD is the glue that holds together the Cloud OS (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)īut that’s just the start. Then you might decide, let’s use Intune or CRM Online, or any of a number of Microsoft’s enterprise cloud services. You’ve proven by using DNS that your company owns the DNS domain of your AD, such as, and then you’ve made the usernames and passwords of your users available to sign into and use those cloud services. Even if you use one of the very simple Exchange Online plans, creating, synchronizing (using DirSync, or the replacement, Azure AD Sync), or federating (using ADFS) user accounts and passwords into these services uses Azure AD under the covers. The first of these cloud services that most businesses implement is Office 365. It allows people to authenticate and authorize against cloud services. To put it simply, Azure AD is an identity store and performs the key feature of AD in the cloud. Microsoft recently launched a preview of Azure AD Domain Services in North American and European regions. When one first hears about Azure AD, one might think “Oh! Domain controllers in the cloud.” It’s not that - yet. The Cloud OS (Image Credit: Microsoft) What is Azure Active Directory?
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