As the quantity of cloud services increases, identity management and security, as well as access policies within cloud environments and cloud services, are becoming even more essential.

The Microsoft central instance for identity management for all Microsoft cloud services is Azure Active Directory (AD). Every subscription, contract, security policy, or identity Microsoft provides for their cloud services is based on Azure AD, which is also called Microsoft Tenant.

In this chapter, you will learn the basics of Azure AD, and how you implement Azure AD and hybrid Azure AD when connecting to Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS).

We are going to explore the following topics:

• Azure AD overview
• Azure AD subscription options
• Azure AD deployment
• Azure AD user and subscription management
• How to deploy Azure AD hybrid identities with AD DS
• Azure AD hybrid high availability and non-high availability deployments