AD and AAD Integration

There are a variety of ways to integrate on-premises Active Directory (AD) deployments with Azure Active Directory (AAD). This chart shows three typical integration levels. Higher levels of integration reduce account management effort and simplify sign-on by users but have higher technical requirements to enable the integration. Each column in this chart shows a degree of integration between AD and AAD, ranging from no integration (“None”), to synchronization of objects and attributes between the two directories, to directory synchronization and federation.

	None	Objects and Attributes Synchronized	Directories Synchronized and Federated
User identities, passwords, and requests to sign-on	Multiple	Multiple (identity must be authenticated by both AAD and AD)	One
Provision of directory objects occurs at	Azure or subscription service portal	On-premises AD, or both if two-way synchronization is configured	On-premises AD, or