The history of this blog explaining what is what in the world of technology is long, we admit. Maybe one day we’ll release a compilation episode, sort of a cabaret musical thing, with all the info and even some special guests, why not! Meanwhile we also tell you what Active Directory is.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s multi-tenant, cloud-based Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. It takes care of authentication and authorization of user and application identities.

For readers who have returned to this blog after understanding the basics of Active Directory (AD) in part 1 of this series, welcome back! For all new readers: Hello! Get ready to jump into the world of AD. It would be good to take a quick peek at what was covered in part 1 before you continue. Be sure to read through part 1 as it will be your guide to: Part 2 of this series aims to introduce the interrelation of AD with the Domain Name System (DNS).

Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) is the traditional, on-premises domain service offered by Microsoft. It is the core component and a server role in Active Directory (AD), the specialized, proprietary directory service in Windows operating system environments. Consider an enterprise or a complex business set up with many connected network resources. In order to ensure the effective management of these resources, IT administrators use AD and its components, including AD DS.

App registrations is a mechanism in Azure AD allowing to work with an application and its permissions. It’s an object in Azure AD that represents the application, its redirect URI (where to redirect users after they have signed in), its logout URL (where to redirect users after they’ve signed out), API access and custom application roles for managing permissions to users and apps.

The Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) service and an identity provider (IdP). Azure AD is the backbone for authentication in Microsoft 365 and for thousands of cloud-based SaaS applications. Azure AD provides several features for your organization and one of the features is the Microsoft Identity Platform.

Active Directory (AD) is a foundational element of any Microsoft Windows environment because of the part it plays in authentication, access management, account management, and authorization. To ensure the health and efficiency of your Active Directory, it’s crucial for you to engage in proper Active Directory auditing and reporting best practices. This article will detail essential Active Directory auditing best practices and provide recommendations for the best Active Directory auditing tools.

This blog post is part 2 of our Monitoring Microsoft Azure Active Directory series. Managing Identity is a big challenge in a cloud environment, especially when users can potentially log in from anywhere. Additionally, users can often use different types of devices to log in and access cloud-hosted resources. Without a central Authentication and Authorization source, it is very difficult to manage who can login to what and who can do what with a cloud resource.

This is a multi-part series that covers monitoring Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD). In this blog post, which is part 1 of the series, you will learn about and understand Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and how it is different from an on-premises Active Directory (AD). As technology keeps evolving, companies increasingly look to technologies like Cloud Computing to expand, modernize and stay competitive, and in doing so companies can expose themselves to risks.

Microsoft has had its own share of outages recently and during the evening of December 15th Azure AD was the cloud culprit. As a result, the Exoprise sensors detected this Microsoft 365 outage more than an hour before Microsoft informed customers of the issue. Here’s some of the errors that users were experiencing if they attempted to sign into Microsoft services: Most of our worldwide customers knew well in advance of the problem before users or business suffered.