What are Active Directory and Azure Active Directory?

We use the term Active Directory to refer to Active Directory Domain Services most of the time, and this role does three main things in Windows Server. It manages users and groups, manages computers, and supports directory-aware applications. Apart from that, there are other Active Directory roles as well. Directory-awareThere are Active Directory Federation Services, Certificate Services, Lightweight Directory Services, and Rights Management Services. So, the point is that Active Directory in itself is not a single service, but is a collection of multiple services designed to perform different tasks.

Azure Active Directory follows a similar structure. It also facilitates the management of users, groups, computers, and applications and it’s not a single service. It’s an umbrella of multiple services, each one of which serves a very strategic function.

Azure AD and Windows Server complement each other well. You can use the AD connect tool to integrate your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory with Azure AD for a hybrid identity infrastructure.

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s primary cloud offering. The Microsoft cloud lives within Microsoft Azure, which is a combination of ultra-redundant data centers located all over the world that offer storage, power, cooling, and all the necessary infrastructure to host cloud servers. So, Microsoft Azure provides X as a service solution. So what does it mean? It means it offers software as a service, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, and directory as a service. Essentially, everything is a service. A platform-as-a-service solution is essentially a platform that is there, managed by the provider, and you are using that platform to manage your solutions on top of it. Infrastructure as a Service allows you to build a network on top of an underlying solution. For example, building out virtual machines, virtual networks, and so on. Software as a Service is completely managed software by a provider that you just plug into.

Azure AD, or Microsoft Entra ID, is an identity provider that can authenticate security principals. So a security principal is really what we are using when we are authenticating to anything that is an identity provider, in this case, Microsoft Entra ID.