Cloudreach Voices - Azure Active Directory

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Copyright ©2015 Cloudreach limited
Cloudreach Voices: Azure Active Directory
Copyright ©2016 Cloudreach Limited
Azure Active
Directory
February 2016
Petr Hecko, DevOps Lead, Cloudreach Canada

Everyone knows what Active Directory is
but how about Azure Active Directory?
Well, Azure AD is a cloud based directory and identity
management service introduced by Microsoft back in
2011.
Here at Cloudy Towers, we hear about Azure AD more and more often now, and many
organizations, including healthcare companies McKesson or Presence Health, are using this
Azure service in their production.
Are you ready to give Azure AD a go?

But what is Azure AD, and what does it do?
To understand what Azure AD is, just imagine a service which lets you
run the traditional Active Directory in the cloud.
However, while in principle traditional AD and Azure AD serve the same
purpose, there are major differences in their design.
While traditional AD provides applications with
access to on-premises resources and uses
protocols like Kerberos and LDAP, Azure AD
was specifically designed to support web-based
services and uses different web-based protocols
(like SAML and OAuth2.0).

So what are the benefits of utilizing Azure AD?
Is it going to fit your organizational needs?

If your organization is fairly small and is not utilizing
any AD yet, but is looking for this kind of solution, a
stand alone version of Azure AD running completely
in the cloud could be a good option.
Of course, big organizations currently using on-
premise AD can take advantage of Azure AD as
well.
In this case, organizations can integrate their on-
premise AD with Azure AD easily, using the Azure
AD Connect tool. Once this integration is complete,
your users can use their existing credentials to
connect to Azure Cloud applications, as well as to
thousands of SaaS applications like Salesforce,
DropBox or Office365.

What editions of Azure AD are available?
All offer features
including:
● Users and Group
management
● SSO-based user
access to SaaS or
Azure AD Connect
for sync between
on-premise and
cloud directories.
Basic and Premium offer
additionally:
● Azure AD sign-in
page logo
● Offloading IT
support when
utilizing self-
service password
reset
● Azure AD offering
of high availability
SLA uptime
(99.9%
● Self-service group
management
● Machine learning based
advanced anomaly security
reports
● Multi-Factor Authentication.
Of course the additional features comes with extra
cost, which can vary for each organization as the
cost depends on the Enterprise Agreement terms.
If you want to find out more about
that, then the detailed comparison
of the three editions can be found
on the Azure AD editions website.

Can I get programmatic access to Azure AD?
You can easily programmatically access the entities in Azure AD, by
using Azure AD Graph API.
Azure AD Graph API provides programmatic
access to Azure AD through REST API endpoints.
Graph API gives you CRUD (Create, Read,
Update and Delete) capabilities so you can do
things such as query the directory to get
information about users or groups, or make
changes to the directories (such as creating,
deleting or updating users).
Graph API is not limited to changes of users or groups, but can also
access any other entity in the directory.

In conclusion
If you are an IT administrator, Azure AD could be a service which
can make your life easier.
With the SSO access to thousands of cloud SaaS applications and
easy to use self-service capabilities, the employee productivity will
improve and the IT admin can focus on more complex tasks than
managing user’s access!
When adding additional features like MFA, Role Based Access
Control (RBAC), application usage monitoring, auditing, security
monitoring and alerting, Azure AD can be a game changer for any
eligible organization.

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Cloudreach Voices - Azure Active Directory

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