Azure Active Directory: Features, Benefits, and How It Differs from Active Directory Domain Services

Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory: Features, Benefits, and How It Differs from Active Directory Domain Services

Are you looking for an identity and access management solution for your organization? Do you want to deploy your own applications securely? If yes, then you must be wondering what Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is and what benefits and features it offers. In this article, we will provide a detailed overview of Azure AD, its benefits, and features, as well as how it differs from Active Directory Domain Services or on-premise Active Directory.

What is Azure Active Directory?

Azure AD is a cloud-based identity and access management service that provides identity and access management for users, groups, devices, and applications. It offers a single user identity for authentication and authorization to all resources. Azure AD helps you access Office 365 services such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Azure. It also allows you to deploy your own applications in Azure AD, and users can access those applications. Moreover, if your users are directly provisioned in Office 365, then the authentication process or the sign-in process is handled by Azure AD.

Benefits of Azure Active Directory

Apart from these benefits, Azure AD offers other features, such as building applications using the Microsoft Identity Platform. Users can sign in to these applications using their Microsoft accounts. As an application developer, you can use Azure AD as a standards-based approach for adding single sign-on (SSO) to your application. Azure AD also provides APIs that can help you to build personalized application experiences.

With the help of business-to-business (B2B) collaboration feature, you can securely interact with your users who are located outside your organization. Using the business-to-customer (B2C) feature, you can allow customers to log into your applications using their local or social accounts. You can secure your applications and the sign-in process using conditional access policies. You can register or join your devices with Azure AD and manage them through InTune.

Features of Azure Active Directory

Azure AD provides various types of reports that give you insights into the security and usage patterns in your environment. When you subscribe to an Office 365 tenant, you automatically get Azure AD and access to all the free features of Azure AD. However, if you want to use more enhanced features of Azure AD, then you can upgrade your subscription to either Azure AD Premium P1 or Premium P2 license.

Azure Active Directory Licenses

Azure AD free subscription provides users and groups management, on-premise directory synchronization, reports, self-service password change for cloud users, and SSO for Office 365 and Azure services. With Azure AD Premium P1 license, you get all the free features of Azure AD and in addition to the free features, P1 also lets your hybrid users access both on-premise and cloud resources. It also supports advanced administration like dynamic groups, self-service group management, Microsoft Identity Manager, and password right back that allows self-service password reset for your on-premise users.

With Azure AD Premium P2 license, you get all the features of free subscription and Premium P1 license. Additionally, P2 license also offers conditional access policies and privileged identity management. You can also get an additional feature license. For example, Azure AD Business to Customer provides identity and access management solutions for your customer-facing applications.

How Azure Active Directory Differs from Active Directory Domain Services

Now let's understand how Azure AD differs from Active Directory Domain Services or on-premise Active Directory. In Active Directory, administrators create users manually or they can use an in-house or automated provisioning system. In Azure AD, we can create users manually or synchronize the on-premise users to our Phase 365 using Azure AD Connect. In on-premise Active Directory, administrators add members in groups manually, and then resources are assigned.