After having some discussions about this technology, I have decided to post a series of posts about this technology, and which options do we have depending the scenario where we are involved, so let’s start!
Today, I’m gonna talk about Azure AD, which probably everyday everyone knows, but in case of not, this is post is also for you. Azure AD is the acronym of Azure Active Directory, which basically is a cloud service identity provider or identity as a Service, in other words, it’s a simpler version of the typical Active Directory that almost every company has.
Which is the main purpose? Extend your AD to support the cloud and to allow business users to work with cloud applications. Simply as is.
How you can imagine, when we are using Azure AD we are relying on Azure, but also, when we are using O365, we are also using Azure AD to store the synchronized identities on the cloud (in case we have configured the synchronization between OnPrem and the cloud), so even if you don’t have an Azure subscription to host services, you can enter to azure portal, enter into Azure Active Directory and manage your users.
So, resuming, if we have O365, we also have Azure AD, and we can manage the users from the O365 portal and from the Azure AD portal. In addition to that, managing users in the Azure AD portal, gives us a lot of possibilities, as conditional access, identity protection, etc… But, to use some of these features, we need a valid license.
Licenses in Azure AD, are divided into Free, Basic, Premium 1 and Premium 2, each has some interesting features, in the following link, you can have a closer look to each of these features:
https://msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net/media/2017/04/AzureADSKUsFeatureComparison.pdf
As we can see, depending of what we want to use, we will need a different license, also, we have to take into account, that every user that will use this “premium” features, will need a valid license, so take in to account we you are planning to implement a service like this into your business.
As we can see, until here Azure AD is easy peasy, but now comes the funny part, have you ever realized that Azure AD is divided into Azure AD Azure B2B and Azure B2C, don’t you? So, in next post I will try to focus more in B2C and B2B to at least show my vision about this technology and possible use cases.
For more info: https://docs.microsoft.com/es-es/azure/active-directory/active-directory-whatis
Albandrod's Memory 