Designing access management across multi-cloud

In the previous section, we learned that we need to have federation with AD in our public cloud environment. The next question is: how do we do that? Azure uses Azure Active Directory (AAD). Just as a reminder: AAD is not the same as AD. AAD is an authentication service in Azure, using AD as the directory. Microsoft positions AAD as IDaaS, something that we will explore in more detail in the last section of this chapter, Enabling account federation in multi-cloud. The primary function of AAD is to synchronize identities to the cloud – Azure – using the existing AD. For the synchronization, it uses Azure AD Connect.

With AAD, enterprises will have a system that provides employees of these enterprises with a mechanism to log in and access resources on different platforms. That can be resources in Azure itself or resources such as applications hosted on systems in the corporate network.

But AAD also provides access to...