Integrating AD and Azure Active Directory

Organizations deploying Microsoft’s hosted services, including Office 365, Intune, and Azure, already use Azure Active Directory (AAD) to authenticate to these services and enforce licensing compliance. Organizations with both AAD and on-premises directories need to integrate those directories to integrate management and simplify sign-on for users. Ongoing changes and updates to AAD, including management, security, and reporting features, require staying alert to avoid redundant AAD tenancies and ensure proper integration with on-premises directories.

Integration Options

Organizations can choose to integrate existing on-premises directories (such as Active Directory Domain Services [AD DS]) into AAD. The degree of integration can span the spectrum from no integration to synchronization of directory information to synchronization and federation, where authentication is performed by the on-premises directory, not AAD. Each scenario offers different trade-offs of security, manageability, and infrastructure required to perform integration. (For a summary of these scenarios, see the chart “AD DS and AAD Integration“.)