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Accessing Resources Across Platforms with Azure
by Jon Lilepage
Accessing Resources Across
Platforms with Azure
As Microso's Azure and Office 365 mature, subscriptions for
both services continue to grow exponentially. In November 2015,
Microso reported 60 million Office 365 accounts active each month;
since then Microso reports an additional 27 million Office 365
accounts with projections to exceed the 100 million mark this year.
The large numbers early on were mainly aributable to small-
to-medium sized businesses taking advantage of cloud services.
These were great deals for companies with less than 100 employees:
they were cheap, required less maintenance, offered the flexibility
to work from anywhere and eliminated messy license agreements.
So what is driving the continued increase of subscriptions? Large
enterprises. Large enterprises are becoming comfortable not only
with the cloud products themselves but also with Microso's security
and privacy.
All this begs the question of how large companies with
resources spread across their on-premise and cloud environments
make the user experience positive while accessing resources across
both platforms. The answer is Azure Active Directory (AAD). To
utilize AAD, though, companies must first know which version best
suits their environments.
Microso breaks AAD down into AAD Free, AAD Basic and
AAD Premium (P1 and P2). A key feature available in every version is
Azure AD Connect, formerly known as DirSync. Azure AD Connect
synchronizes on-premise Active Directory (AD) with the cloud while
AAD runs in hybrid mode. Hybrid mode gives companies plenty of
time to test and migrate resources from on-premise to the cloud
before fully jumping into the deep end of AAD.