Six Steps from On-Premises to Full Cloud

• Organizations must increasingly focus on and invest in Microsoft-cloud based services because it increasingly retires legacy on-premises products.
• This includes shifting identity services from on-premises Active Directory to the Microsoft-hosted Entra ID infrastructure used by most of Microsoft’s hosted services.
• While Microsoft suggests six discrete phases most organizations will go through, every organization is different and will need to design and implement their own migration process.
• Many organizations won’t retire Active Directory technologies in the foreseeable future; but given Microsoft’s decreasing investment in AD, organizations should also be decreasing their investment.

Most organizations are already deeply invested in Microsoft’s cloud, typically having started with Office 365, which later expanded to become Microsoft 365. As Microsoft continued to mature and evolve Entra ID over time, organizations also began increasing their investment in it, pushing beyond basic Office 365 user management to a formal cloud-based directory, often adopting additional Microsoft applications and infrastructure like Azure and Dynamics 365, and third-party applications that also integrated into Entra ID. With budgets stretched thin, organizations should be planning to maximize their Microsoft cloud-based infrastructure while drawing down and eventually retiring as much on-premises infrastructure as possible. Most organizations are likely to still need Active Directory (AD) for some time due to legacy AD-integrated applications and infrastructure.