Windows Azure Active Directory Cartoon

re: Windows Azure Active Directory Cartoon

...Planky — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 19:20:36 GMT

Hi mrpaulb,

Yes I agree. I think Tony probably works in a large company with a big on-premises infrastructure. For him federated identities make perfect sense.

The identities in WAAD for a small business are still in essence federated, it's just that the claims store is running up in the cloud as Is the IP. For a small business, I think the more infrastructure you can put in the cloud, the better.

re: Windows Azure Active Directory Cartoon

mrpaulb — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:01:47 GMT

If your a small business why put AD onsite and then have to deal with federation, security general management etc. why have any infrastructure on site for that matter.

I strongly believe that an integrate cloud experience covering O365, InTune, Azure with WAAD will be a boon for many a small business.

Keep up the good work

Kind regards

Paul

re: Windows Azure Active Directory Cartoon

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re: Windows Azure Active Directory Cartoon

...Planky — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 09:03:52 GMT

Hi Tony,

Wow - you really are passionate about federation - that's good to see.

I don't think you'd put AD (traditional AD) in the cloud if the only service you were consuming was ofice365. It has its own directory (which is now called Azure AD). So there's no need for it - it's all part of Office365 in the first place.

But let's say you have some cloud apps, a few other internet connected apps PLUS office 365, then obviously federation is the answer - exactly the point you make. But if you are a small organisation with a small number of users then the IT burden of building an internal AD to federate with these external services would be pretty huge. The service management - like for example if the local ADFS server went down, then you'd not be able to access any federated services - that's a pretty big risk for a small business.

The non-enterprise size businesses have been asking Microsoft for a few years now if we could provide a way for them to do this but in the cloud so that we run the infrastructure and they consume its services.

So think of it more for the organisation that doesn't own and operate its own AD and federation infrastructure. If you think about it - in the on-premises world, to federate your AD with Office 365, you need an ADFS server. But you also need a proxy so that your road-warriors can also authenticate. But of course that's risky, so you need a minimum of 2 of each server in case of failures. The burden of these extra 4 servers on a small organisation would probably be substantial. To a large enterprise, it's just a case of expanding the existing infrastructure. To a smaller company - especially say one in the 10-user area - it's just not tenable.

So - yes, I wholeheartedy agree with your point that the world is moving toward federation. It'd be a shame to lock the smaller business out of that opportunity - so the cloud is used to deliver the directory/federation service and take away almost all of the aspects of service management. I think that's perfect for the business that doesn't have an IT person on its staff...

If the only businesses in the world were big companies with IT departments - I'd be 110% on your side so I can exactly see where you are coming from.

re: Windows Azure Active Directory Cartoon

Tony — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 20:52:02 GMT

The push for Azure AD is really nothing more than transparent marketing from MS. Please tell me why in God's name I would put AD "in the cloud" for Office 365 as opposed to using federated authentication (SAML, WS-Fed)?

I think it's hilarious that while the rest of the world is moving toward a federated identity model, Microsoft is pushing has this ridiculous agenda of pulling AD to the cloud. #pointless

re: Windows Azure Active Directory Cartoon

Mike Kline — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 20:41:07 GMT

I like the style of your video, very easy for people to follow. I also just followed you on twitter.