Building and Managing Azure Active Directory

Working with the several Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings such as Office 365, Dynamics CRM or Visual Studio Online requires well-managed identities and an excellent basic structure in the Azure Active Directory (AD) that builds the heart of these solutions. You, as an administrator, need to provide a stable identity and access management platform to manage these services. 

This chapter explains how to configure a suitable Azure AD tenant, which we use throughout the whole book to explore, understand, and configure the different features and functions in the field of identity and access management with Microsoft Azure. We start with the cloud-only components, followed in the next chapters by the hybrid identity and access management approach.

In this chapter, we go directly to the configuration and learn how to configure and manage users, groups, roles, and administrative units to provide a user and group-based application and self-service access, including the audit functionality. The chapter focuses on the following :

• Implementation scenario overview
• Implementing a solid Azure Active Directory
• Creating and managing users and groups
• Assigning roles and administrative units
• Protecting your administrative accounts
• Providing user and group-based application access
• Activating password reset

• Using standard security monitoring
• Integrating the Azure AD Join for Windows 10 clients
• Configuring a custom domain
• Configure Azure AD Domain Services

Now, we can introduce the implementation scenario.