Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s cloud-based directory and identity management service. The fundamentals of Azure AD include:
- Tenant: A tenant is a dedicated instance of Azure AD that is unique to an organization. It represents an organization’s identity and access management environment in the Azure cloud.
- Directory: A directory is a container for users, groups, applications, and other resources in Azure AD. It is used to organize and manage objects and to enforce access policies.
- User and Group Management: Azure AD provides user and group management capabilities to enable administrators to create, modify, and delete user and group accounts. It also provides access controls to manage user access to resources.
- Application Management: Azure AD allows administrators to manage access to cloud-based applications and services. It provides single sign-on (SSO) capabilities for applications and enables administrators to manage access to applications based on user roles and group memberships.
- Conditional Access: Conditional Access is a policy-based access control feature that enables administrators to define rules for accessing resources based on user identity, device health, location, and other criteria. This feature provides an additional layer of security to protect against unauthorized access.
- Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): MFA is a security feature that requires users to provide additional authentication factors, such as a phone number or a biometric identifier, in addition to their password. Azure AD provides MFA capabilities to enhance security for user accounts.
- Role-based Access Control (RBAC): RBAC is a permission model that enables administrators to assign permissions to users and groups based on their roles and responsibilities. Azure AD provides RBAC capabilities to manage access to resources in the cloud.
- Azure AD Connect: Azure AD Connect is a tool that enables administrators to synchronize on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD. It allows organizations to extend their existing identity infrastructure to the cloud, enabling users to use the same credentials for on-premises and cloud-based resources.
