Designing synchronization solutions
We’ve already touched on the fact that Microsoft 365 is an identity-driven platform. This means you need to provision some sort of identity for your users to begin accessing the tools and features of the service.
When discussing Azure AD, it’s important to understand where identities are stored and how authentication is performed. With Azure AD, three basic identity models are available:
- Cloud authentication: Cloud authentication is a model where identities are created in (or synchronized to) Azure AD and the authentication is processed by Azure AD
- Federated identity: With federated identity, user objects are synchronized to Azure AD, but the authentication happens in the identity source’s directory
- External identity: Commonly used for business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) scenarios, external identity is used when a tenant stores a type of reference or a guest object that represents an external...
