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March 04, 2020
In our company, we use Azure AD as a hybrid with Active Directory Federation Services. In this way, we can maintain a coherent structure of all the local users of the company as well as all our remote users. We do it this way since all our office platform is mounted on Office 365. The entire Azure and AD platform is managed by our IT Department.
- Centralized administration of users through different locations.
- Comprehensive OU management through a single interface.
- Immediate availability of our forest throughout the company.
- Microsoft integrated security throughout the deployment.
- In our case, it requires an AD FS structure which requires extra maintenance.
- The synchronization sometimes takes too long.
- We would like to use Azure AD Premium, but its costs are very high.
January 29, 2020
Azure Active Directory is our primary authentication mechanism and also provides the basis for a large portion of our authorization mechanisms throughout our enterprise. Everyone in our organization (roughly 150,000 active people objects) has an Active Directory account that they use to authenticate and also gain access to our physical network, our ERP (PeopleSoft), our LMS (Blackboard), and our primary systems of engagement and content (Office 365).
- As a directory tool, it provides the ability for distributed management and administration of smaller pieces as needed by the organization.
- With Azure Active Directory being cloud based, there are frameworks available to integrate authentication to other systems (both cloud and on-prem), such as Azure Application Proxies, etc.
- While it may satisfy basic directory type functions of Identity Management, it doesn't go deep enough by default for the modern workplace (at least without significant effort and potentially dangerous changes to the scheme).
- Some of the more useful features are only available at a cost, with the most desirable and useful features costing the most.
April 07, 2020
Azure Active Directory is used across our entire organization. It is the way that everyone uses to access Office 365 and all its tools. It is also used to manage single sign-on for other services. It is the source for authentication for many of our tools.
- Authentication
- Auditing
- Flexibility
- Costs
- Complexity of licensing
- Learning of new features
March 20, 2020

We currently use Azure Active Directory (AAD) for:
Fundamentally, this was implemented to help us support Office 365. After initial success with Office 365, we were impressed by the offering and broadened it to take advantage of more features.
- User & Group Management
- Single Sign-On
- Multi-Factor Authentication
- Self-Service Password Management
- Synchronization between on-premise and cloud AAD
- Device Enrollment
- Reporting (Security & Usage)
Fundamentally, this was implemented to help us support Office 365. After initial success with Office 365, we were impressed by the offering and broadened it to take advantage of more features.
- Self-service password reset.
- User and group management.
- Synchronization between cloud and on-premise active directory.
- Technical support.
- A maturing product with many loose ends and inconsistencies.
- Sprawling documentation with limited "getting started" guides.
March 13, 2020

We use Azure Active Directory as our "management" tool for our internal active directory. It is used company wide, and one of the most important functions is to provide single sign-on functionality. Other reasons are:
- Role management employees.
- Employee "creation" (maintenance).
- Login rules.
- Group membership.
- Speed. After a user used the wrong password more than a certain threshold, we can unlock the user with a simple powershell script.
- Extensibility. We can write powershell scripts for every maintenance issue. Which is great if you're not "on premise."
- If you don't want to use powershell, Azure makes sure you can provide user support anywhere through Azure.
- Azure has so many tools, services and functionalities that it's not easy to find your way around and get to the maintenance area where you can start working. This makes it unnecessarily hard to use.
- I really can't think of anything "missing." It does what it's supposed to do. But I'm a developer in a support role, so I can speak for infrastructure department.
February 26, 2020

Utilized for very basic management of users, workstations and security access groups within our domain which covers the whole organization. It helps being a single point of administration. Luckily we are 100% Windows devices.
- Adding/copying users.
- Group management.
- Updating profiles can be cumbersome occasionally.
- With our environment, sync issues occur sometimes.
November 12, 2019
We are using Azure Active Directory (AAD) primarily for two things - access permissions in Exchange, SharePoint and other Office 365 services as well as locally in our network for domain/workstation access and logging. AAD opened the doors in many ways for us to enhance our organization and bring ourselves to modern times in terms of technology and what our users can do. Such as, our users had two or more sets of credentials (1 for Office 365, another for domain access and another for SharePoint). Combining our Exchange and SharePoint into Microsoft's hosted platforms and including AAD into our setup, we reduced the credentials down to just needing one set that is synced across my local AD & AAD. This has saved my IT support department many hours in helping users access services, reset passwords multiple times and has saved us time when setting up new users in just one place rather than several. With AAD it automatically sets the user up in the cloud and eliminates my need to set them up several times to have access to our services.
- AAD is super easy to set up! One thing I was nervous about was deployment. However, after reading the setup instructions, I was pleased to find this a very simple process and well detailed in the instructions.
- AAD works! It simply does it's job. I have not had to monitor it, troubleshoot it, nor reinstall or tinker with it in any way. Making changes is very quick and easy also allowing you to quickly modify how the sync occurs, whether one-direction from your server to Azure only, or bi-directional where it will sync both ways, or only from Azure to your local AD. You have the options and the control to make it work for your environment!
- AAD has a ton of tools, logs, data that combined provides a great look into what your users are doing, how it is being done and if any error exist it will provide very useful information about it so that you can resolve the matter.
- One limitation is the OS it must be installed on. We were using SBS '11 when we first deployed AAD, however it does not work for the sync to Azure on this OS. For this, we worked around it by first setting up a secondary local AD on a server that already had Server 2016 on it. Having these two server sync the local AD, we were able to install and configure the AAD sync on the Server 2016. It sync's perfectly and our environment works great being sync'd to AAD.
- Depending on the licensing you have with Microsoft, you will find some features not available. We had to add a $4 license per user (called the Exchange F1 License) to have the ability to sync FROM Azure TO my local AD. This is key for users to be able to modify their passwords anywhere and it updates across your AAD & local AD. You will also have to add another type of license should you want more auditing features or security features.
- It would be great to see Azure have a component in AD where you just enable the sync rather than needing to install the entire package to be able to sync.
September 24, 2019
My company uses Active Directory across the entire enterprise, which is probably the most common way that it's used. It's used to maintain a directory of users, groups, computers, service accounts and other resources, it is also used to authenticate those users and machines to the network, and to permit them access to network resources based on the individual user's or computer's permissions and group memberships. Active Directory acts as our primary resource management tool. It's where we store the identities of people and things that allow us to quickly create things like access control lists for data and network segments.
- Azure Active Directory is very at maintaining user and computer data in a fully-replicated database.
- Azure Active Directory is very good at notifying administrators whenever there is a problem with the AD database content or replication.
- In my opinion, Azure Active Directory's dashboard pages are way too busy and difficult to navigate.
- Azure Active Directory doesn't handle duplicate attributes in user accounts very well.
- Azure Active Directory pesters the admin to buy additional features by cluttering up the GUI with "suggestions" that you can't remove from the dashboard.
We use Azure AD primary to administer users across the GE enterprise, in particular with Microsoft software licensing and e-mail account administration. This software administers countless users across all divisions of General Electric around the globe. Azure AD provides a lightweight, web-based interface that allows for easy, on-the-fly administration of users from anywhere with internet access.
- Lightweight web interface.
- Easy to use, point and click interface.
- It provides for the administration of users across the enterprise from anywhere with an internet connection.
- At times the interface can be less than intuitive.
- Failure of connection can lead to questions as to whether a change was actually processed.
- Sometimes the screen layout can be confusing.
September 05, 2019
Azure Active Directory is used within our whole organization. It is used as our identity and access management tool to manage authentication within our corporate network and internal tools. With the help of this tool, employees within the organization would no longer need to memorize many credentials to different systems. Without a centralized authentication system in an environment with many IT tools, employees tend to find it tedious to memorize multiple credentials, and it would lead them to just write down, on a piece of paper or notepad, their multiple credentials which would raise the risks of compromised access. This problem has been effectively addressed by Azure Active Directory.
- It's easy to implement policies within Active Directory.
- Clustering users is easily achieved by establishing Organizational Units.
- It can be used to authenticate users' credentials, even in other cloud platforms.
- We have not encountered any problems with Azure Active Directory.
November 19, 2019
Azure Active Directory has been implemented organizationally, but is managed by the systems team following a migration of assets to Office365. We are also in process of implementing virtual machines in the Azure space in addition to a site to site VPN back to our HQ for potential DR opportunity. It has so far been easy to manage, sometimes with some assistance from consultants.
- Organization of items/technology buckets.
- Streamlined implementation.
- Licensing is straightforward.
- Some areas are still a little convoluted and require some research or MS/consultant engagement.
September 19, 2019
It was easy integration, Migration and implementation end to end project as its seamless and easy. In fact the virtualization engineering become so easy with easy policy management and Azure AD set up. It is highly recommended for any size company/organizations.
- Citrix Virtualization - Policy management for both on prem - on cloud
- Access Control management- with other 3rd party tools is easy and you see very less error. It works great when you thin of MFA etc
- Cloud Computing- Azure has made the access control seamless with Azure AD - a must have product
- Integration with VM
- Integration and policy management for Printers and other 3rd party apps
- more collaboration with new tools and PAAS platform
November 21, 2019

We use Azure Active Directory to assign roles for integrated cloud-based applications and virtual machine in Azure Active Directory. We also sync some identity and group data from our on-premise AD instance for cloud workloads. It allows us to reuse the same identities in the cloud as we have on-prem and entitle them to appropriate resources.
- Azure Active Directory is a cloud-based directory service that can be utilized for all kinds of identity authorizations.
- Azure Active Directory creates a domain for your users, and Azure-based VM's that is similar to the well understood on-prem AD we all know and love.
- Azure Active Directory is an excellent way to bring identities from different organizations together in a cloud environment for all types of cross- org collaborations.
- More API's and API functionality is always welcomed.
- Expansion into other cloud federation use cases and IDP possibilities.
- Ability to detect identity compromises with high accuracy and low false positives.
November 09, 2019

We use Azure AD to help with our single sign-on for Office 365 and there are plans to extend the use to cover our new BI solution, as well as a new ERP system (both are still work in progress, so cannot really comment on now). So far, once you overcome the issues with the sync, AAD is a great product with a really good integration with other Microsoft products.
- Sync my local AD users to the cloud, providing seamless integration with O365 and potentially other MS products.
- It is highly configurable and secure.
- A small, but important issue that it addresses is it allows us to upload photos of the end-users. This is a great help in a dynamic environment.
- The AAD sync software does crash, so it needs constant monitoring.
- The sync interval is not easy to change and manual sync is needed occasionally.
- The web interface can be a bit confusing to a new administrator, however, once you get used to it, it is ok.
October 16, 2019

Azure Active Directory is used mainly because of our Office 365 implementation. But as we also have EMS E3 we are also using a couple of the P1 features. We are a multinational organization and are using one tenant. This has some issues but most are solvable. Having a cloud identity available can create new opportunities.
- Within the Azure world, there are many services available that make use of your cloud identity.
- If you have Azure AD P1 or P2 you can protect your Azure AD Identity even further.
- It is still not really useable to have 1 tenant with multiple, more or less independent, entities. We could use that and there are things coming, but not there yet.
- If you are used to an on-prem active directory, there are some gotchas and things you must know that are different in Azure AD. Nothing major.
November 15, 2019

Azure Active Directory is used to manage all of the Windows accounts with our company.
- It's very easy to create and manage accounts. Takes no time at all to edit or even create new accounts.
- It would be nice if more things could be managed from azure in a hybrid environment like resetting passwords from the cloud.
July 11, 2019
We use Azure Active Directory organization-wide both internally, and at the vast majority of our clients. Azure AD is used to both complement, and in some situations, replace entirely on-premise Active Directory. It is used for user authentication, both for Microsoft cloud services (Office 365) as well as the Identity Provider for SSO for various other services. Itis the glue that holds together device management via InTune. For clients with on-premise AD, Azure AD Connect keeps Azure AD & on-premise AD in sync, so users only have one password to remember, one multifactor authentication service will work across multiple on-premise and cloud services, and onboarding/offboarding by IT staff is greatly simplified by having just one "account" to control access to.
- Sync with on-premise AD via Azure AD Connect app. When it first started out as DirSync, it had major issues with conflicts, but now Connect is reliable, simple to implement and keeps getting new features like.
- SSO implementation with 3rd party cloud services is excellent. MS even has step by step guides to popular apps/services!
- InTune integration with Azure AD/Hybrid Azure AD brings domain devices and BYOD devices together under one device management pane of glass.
- Azure portal is extremely complex and many things are in areas you wouldn't expect them.
- Hybrid Azure AD is very confusing to setup and offers very little troubleshooting data to go on.
- I've found that sometimes on-premise AD passwords stop syncing via Azure AD Connect with no errors but a quick script for a full hash password sync clears it up.
July 05, 2019
We use Azure Active Directory to bring our Active Directory to the cloud. That enables us to use a Single Sign On strategy with Office365 and other products, avoiding multiple users/passwords for different services.
- Synchronization between on premises AD and Azure AD.
- Ease of management thru its web interface.
- Problems when allowing users to change their password using the web interface.
- Sometimes it's hard to configure the synchronization between the on premises AD and Azure.
Azure Active Directory helps us to secure our organization’s resources. We purchased a stand-alone application and integrated with Office 365 and another tool from Microsoft. Also, we use a cloud-based solution from Microsoft that is integrating well with Azure Active Directory. With this solution, we manage our user group and have implemented single sign-on authentication and Multi-Factor Authentication.
- Integration with other tools, especially from Microsoft.
- MFA Authentication works very well.
- Usage reports are very intuitive.
- The solution is the best identity management that we have used ever.
- Sometimes the solution runs slowly.
- Documentation can be more complete.
- The rich functionality assumes some complexity of implementation -- but that is not necessarily bad.
December 01, 2018

Azure Active Directory is being used in our organization as a centralized place to grant access to both our Office 365 cloud resources and our on-site computer login resources. We use it to create new user profiles, reset passwords, monitor and audit sign-ins, control user settings and permissions, and create groups.
- Creating new users, new guest users, and assigning licenses is simple and quick.
- Auditing user activity is powerful and user-friendly. The only downside is that the log reporting tool only goes back 30 days.
- Azure AD Connect allows for fast and simple syncing. It also monitors the sync status and will alert you if there an issue with the sync.
- The pricing is competitive and nonprofit discounts are available.
- Configuring Multi-Factor Authentication is confusing and not streamlined. Microsoft even says, "There are many ways of deploying MFA with Azure AD." I wish they would simplify the process, as it requires a lot of time and research to use MFA properly.
- There are too many user and administration roles. Instead of 20+ role options, I wish Azure AD would reduce it to the five most common and allow the creation of custom roles, as needed.
Azure Active Directory Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is Azure Active Directory?
Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution supporting restricted access to applications with Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) built-in, single sign-on (SSO), B2B collaboration controls, self-service password, and integration with Microsoft productivity and cloud storage (Office 365, OneDrive, etc) as well as 3rd party services.
Azure Active Directory Pricing
- Does not have featureFree Trial Available?No
- Has featureFree or Freemium Version Available?Yes
- Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
- Entry-level set up fee?No
Edition | Pricing Details | Terms |
---|---|---|
Premium P1 | $6.00 | per user/per month |
Premium P2 | $9.00 | per user/per month |
Azure Active Directory Technical Details
Deployment Types: | SaaS |
---|---|
Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
Mobile Application: | No |