This service helps your employees access external resources, such as Microsoft 365, the Azure portal, and thousands of other SaaS applications.

To quote Microsoft directly “Azure Active Directory is a cloud-based identity and access management service. If you need more information, check out these resources:Īctive Directory Domain Services OverviewĪctive Directory Domain Services - MS Learnĭeploy and manage identity infrastructure Enter, Azure Active Directory (AAD)Īzure Active Directory is Microsoft’s modern authentication and authorisation provider designed for the cloud providing the latest industry standards. We won’t go into too much detail here, as this article is intended for people that already have a working knowledge of Active Directory services, but as a quick recap:Īctive Directory Domain Services (ADDS), more commonly referred to as simply Active Directory, is a centralised identity and access management service that runs as a role on a Windows server operating system. We will also provide some examples for the different types of setups, and talk at the end about some common mistakes or pitfalls to watch out for. In this blog we will talk about the two Azure AD versions, explain what they are, their relative strengths and weaknesses in comparison with other Active Directory products. Two were designed specifically for the cloud - Azure AD (AAD) and Azure AD Domain Services (AADDS). It’s not surprising, considering Microsoft has three main products under the Active Directory banner. And what we have discovered is that people often get confused about the different versions of Azure Active Directory. Inside the Microsoft ecosystem, the name Active Directory is synonymous with Identity.Īny organisation that uses any Microsoft business service, Azure, Microsoft 365 etc, or that runs any sort of Enterprise software on Windows Server, will be using some version(s) of Active Directory.Īt Contino, we often find ourselves talking to our clients and even our peers, about identity and access management. Azure AD vs Azure AD Domain Services - key differences and limitations

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