Active Directory from on-premises to the cloud

Identity management, provisioning, role management, and authentication are key services both on-premises and through the (Hybrid) cloud. With the Bring Your Own Apps (BYOA) for the cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, the desire to better collaborate a la Facebook with the “social” enterprise, the need to support and integrate with social networks, which lead to a Bring Your Own Identity (BYOI) trend, identity becomes a service where identity “bridges” in the cloud talk to on-premises directories or the directories themselves MOVE and/or are located in the cloud.

Active Directory (AD) is a Microsoft brand for identity related capabilities. In the on-premises world, Windows Server AD provides a set of identity capabilities and services and is hugely popular (88% of Fortune 1000 and 95% of enterprises use AD). Windows Azure AD is AD reimagined for the cloud, designed to solve for you the new identity and access challenges that come with the shift to a cloud-centric, multi-tenant world.

Windows Azure AD can be truly seen as an Identity Management as a Service (IDMaaS) cloud multi-tenant service. This goes Far beyond taking AD and simply running it within a virtual machine (VM) in Windows Azure.

This document is intended for IT professionals, system architects, and developers who are interested in understanding the various options for managing and using identities in their (hybrid) cloud environment based on the AD foundation and how to Leverage the related capabilities. AD, AD in Windows Azure and Windows Azure AD are indeed useful for slightly different scenarios. This document is part of a series of documents on the identity and security features of Windows Azure AD/Office 365 (see the links below for the other available documents in the series).