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How does Azure AD Connect work?

Last updated on September 25, 2022 @ 11:41 am

Azure AD Connect is a cloud-based identity management service that helps organizations connect their on-premises Active Directory (AD) and Azure AD accounts. Azure AD Connect helps organizations to simplify the process of accessing their AD identities in the cloud, and to manage and secure their identities across the cloud and on-premises.

Azure AD Connect supports single sign-on (SSO) and provides a common user experience and management capabilities across on-premises and cloud-based applications. Azure AD Connect also supports enterprise applications and services that need to access AD identities, such as customer management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and security solutions.

Azure AD Connect works by synchronizing the user accounts and group membership data in your on-premises AD with the Azure AD identities that users currently have in the cloud. When a user signs in to a cloud-based application, Azure AD Connect automatically authenticates the user with AD and synchronizes their group membership data with the user’s Azure AD account.

Azure AD Connect also synchronizes account settings, such as passwords, contacts, and calendar entries. This helps to ensure that the user’s experience when accessing cloud-based applications is consistent across devices and platforms.

When a user signs out of a cloud-based application, Azure AD Connect removes their AD account from the cloud and synchronizes their user profile data with their on-premises user profiles. This helps to ensure that the user’s personal data is removed from the cloud when they sign out of the application, and that it is not available to other users or to the cloud-based application itself.

PRO TIP: Azure AD Connect is a tool that allows you to synchronize your on-premises Active Directory with Azure Active Directory. This tool is designed to give you a seamless sign-in experience between your on-premises environment and Azure. However, there are some important things to keep in mind when using Azure AD Connect.

First, it is important to understand how Azure AD Connect works. This tool uses a process called delta synchronization to keep your on-premises and Azure AD environments in sync. Delta synchronization is a process where only changes that have been made since the last synchronization are sent to Azure AD. This process can help reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred and can help keep your environment synchronized more quickly.

However, there are some caveats to using delta synchronization. One is that if there are any errors in the synchronization process, it is possible for data to become out of sync. Additionally, if you delete an object from your on-premises Active Directory environment, that object will be deleted from Azure AD as well. For these reasons, it is important to have a backup of your data before using Azure AD Connect.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Azure AD Connect will synchronize all of the objects in

Azure AD Connect also supports federation with other identity systems, such as Shibboleth and LDAP. When a user signs in to a cloud-based application using their AD account, Azure AD Connect also signs them in to the application using their Shibboleth or LDAP identity.

This helps to federate the identity of the user across different identity systems.

Azure AD Connect is free for organizations that have an Active Directory environment and an Azure AD account. Azure AD Connect also includes a number of features that are available only to paid users, such as support for conditional access policies and role-based access control.

Organizations that use Azure AD Connect can reduce the time it takes to deploy and manage their identity solutions by using Azure AD Connect to connect to their on-premises AD.

Azure AD Connect helps to simplify the process of accessing your AD identities in the cloud, and to manage and secure your identities across the cloud and on-premises.

Drew Clemente

Drew Clemente

Devops & Sysadmin engineer. I basically build infrastructure online.