Azure Active Directory

"With Azure Active Directory, Royal Dutch Shell provides fast, highly secure access to external vendors, cutting onboarding time from months to less than a week. “With SaaS solutions, you gain speed-of-change. Moving to the cloud is the overall Shell strategy to obtain a much more agile, fast-moving environment than we could with an on-premises space.”

Johan Krebbers IT Chief Technology Officer at Royal Dutch Shell

Identity: The Control Plane of the Enterprise

Your organization spent time and energy maintaining your on-premises Active Directory. Now, IT can provide the same controls, sign on and management experience to cloud applications hosted in the public cloud.

Azure Active Directory:

provides single sign on to Office 365 and thousands of other SaaS applications, eliminating the time it takes to enable / disable a user to sign on to all of their work-related cloud apps
enables multifactor authentication to O365 and to third party SaaS, which will text or call users with a second factor of security when logging in, with conditional access so that they only get a second prompt when off campus.
allows users to reset their own passwords
connects to on premises LDAP directories like Shibboleth
allows users to create and manage their own security groups (to add/delete users without IT)

You can get a free trial of Azure AD Premium to test these features, and our experts at Enabling Technologies can help you get them set up.

For a visual explanation of Azure AD, check out the 11-minute video. Many new capabilities have been added since its recording, but the fundamentals are still sound.

Microsoft's access management offerings are Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Premium and Azure AD B2C. Microsoft uses an IDaaS delivery model, which includes Azure AD Connect to support on-premises directory integration and synchronization. The company added Passthrough Authentication and SSO functionality in 2017. This feature set uses lightweight components similar to other vendors, and it can replace Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) for some organizations that don't need AD FS for on-premises application integration. Azure AD Premium includes reporting, security analytics and MFA, and some user-provisioning functionality for SaaS apps. It also includes a license to use Microsoft Identity Manager, its software tool, which provides identity synchronization with some workflow support for on-premises systems. Microsoft has a broad portfolio of infrastructure, platforms, applications and services, many of which are underpinned by Azure AD.

For the Access Management Gartner Report

November 11, 2018

Understanding Office 365 Identities

Which one is right for you? Your identity model is how you choose to integrate your Office 365 user directory with your existing corporate directory. When moving your organization to Office 365, this...

October 10, 2018

Password-less sign in for Azure AD

Microsoft recently announced password-less phone sign in for Azure AD accounts. If your users are already using Azure Multi-Factor Authentication with Microsoft Authenticator app, your already most...

October 10, 2018

Azure Storage Gets Advanced Threat Protection

Microsoft continues to improve protection controls for data stored in Azure. In their defense in depth model, they’ve released Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Storage into public preview, to...

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