What is azure AD?
Azure Active Directory a.k.a. Azure AD – the heart of any organization is a multi-tenant cloud based identity and access management service or Identity as a Service (IdaaS) provided by Microsoft that can integrate with variety of applications, web API’s, O365, Dynamics 365, mobile apps and so on. Azure AD used REST Api’s to transfer data from one system to another. Its primary purpose is to provide authentication and authorization for applications in the cloud.
Why Azure AD?
It helps in managing users and access to the resources in cloud. It provides the flexibility to assign users to groups and groups to allow access to applications for a better control.
Azure AD offers a plethora of benefits
Single sign on
Another benefit is Single sign on which means one identity for all your resources that allows users to access all of the applications they need by signing in only once using their domain user account.
Security
Azure Ad provides security in protecting users’ identity from being compromised. It helps in reducing sign on risk with MFA, conditional access, threat detection, just in time access and many other functionalities to eliminate identity theft.
Third party collaboration
Azure AD is designed to collaborate with external identities. It offers built-in federation functionalities for inviting external users to use your internal enterprise application without managing their credentials in house.
Easy to expand On-Prem AD to cloud
With Azure AD Connect, it’s easy to expand the OnPrem AD to Azure. Azure AD connect works as an agent between the 2 environment and sync data. In addition to syncing the identities data, it also provides features like password hash synchronization, pass-through authentication and federation which allows user to use the same username and password. Their are certain recommendations to be followed however. Follow the article for more information.
Identity governance
Identity governance provides a way of managing user identities and their access entitlements. It provides a policy-based control to monitor and review level of access the users have been granted within your IAM lifecycle.
Azure AD licensing options
- Azure Active Directory Free tier
- Azure Active DirectoryPremiumP1 tier
- Azure Active Directory Premium P2 tier
- Pay as you Go
Please follow the link to know more about the licensing options
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/active-directory-whatis
This is not the complete list of services offered by Azure AD, there is a lot more other then managing user access to cloud applications. Please go through the provided links for in-depth details. I’ll cover piece-by-piece in upcoming writeups.
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