What is Azure identity management? - Active Directory Tutorial

- [Instructor] We all know Microsoft Azure provides a great opportunity to host data and application in the cloud. Most organizations already have an on-premise environment, and it's probably quite complex. It's highly unlikely that they will simply switch to the cloud and get rid of their existing environment, right? These organizations will need a solution that will enable them to migrate to the cloud in stages. During this time, their IT infrastructure will include both on-premise and cloud-hosted solutions. So how do you access an environment where some applications are on-premise and some are in the cloud? This is where hybrid identity comes in. With hybrid identity, a user can log in to any application with one singular identity. In other words, whether an application is in the cloud or on-premise really does not matter. They will use the same process to access the application. Before we dive into the details, let's first do a quick refresher of some basic terminologies within the context of this course. First is identity. Identity means the user ID that is used for signing into a system or application. Next is directory. Directory is the place where all objects are stored, including user identity. For Windows on-premise environment, it is the active directory. For Azure, it is the Azure active directory, also known as Azure AD. Next is hybrid. Hybrid refers to an environment which spans from on-premise to the cloud. And last but not the least is authentication. It means the process of validating a user's identity. Let's look at the example of Landon Hotel. Landon Hotel currently has 1,400 users hosted in on-premise active directory, and all their existing applications are also hosted on on-premise servers. Landon Hotels IT department have plans to implement Microsoft 365 for all their users, which is pretty exciting. They are keeping most of their existing applications on the on-premise servers, at least for the time being. They want the users to use existing username and password to sign into both on-premise environment and cloud applications, such as Microsoft Teams. Therefore, they will need to deploy hybrid identity management solution. Throughout this course, we will see how they plan to implement hybrid identity management solution for their environment. Since our course is about planning for hybrid identity management system, we are only focusing on organizations that already have on-premise AD environment and are looking for a solution to integrate with Azure while maintaining their on-premise solution. Organizations that do not have existing on-premise AD or do not need to have any on-premise solution are not within the scope for this course. These organizations can easily deploy cloud only identity management solution. So basically what that means is that we are not going to cover identity solutions that are cloud only. In this course, we are only covering hybrid identity solutions. Before we dive into all the details of this course, let's see what we are trying to achieve by doing all this planning. Our goal for planning is following. First, determine the exact architecture of deploying the hybrid solution that meets all the requirements, which basically means that we have a set of requirements and then we first want to determine, as in draw out, the exact architecture, the servers, the network infrastructure, all the network connections that are required. We want to draw it all out at the end of the planning stage. Next is to determine the exact process of how users will be signing in to this new environment. That means that we have to narrow down all the authentication process before we can deploy anything. In order to achieve these goals, this course is structured in the following way. It starts with a detailed requirement analysis process. So basically I'll discuss how you can do a detailed requirement analysis. Then we'll discuss the steps of how to identify the best authentication method. Next, we'll move on to discuss different integration options with pros and cons to determine which option will meet all your requirements. Last but not the least, I'll bring it all together with an example of Landon Hotel and how they chose their hybrid identity management system. As you can see, we have a lot to cover. So without further ado, let's get started.