Integrating AD
One of the first steps is to understand how your organization wishes to authenticate its users and from where. A cloud-native approach may be sufficient for some, but some form of integration with an on-premises directory will be required for others. We will look at what they are in the following sections.
Cloud native
The simplest scenario is cloud native; we only need to set up user accounts within Azure AD. Authentication is performed via the web using HTTPS, and access is only required into Azure or other services that integrate with Azure AD—such as a web application using token-based authentication, as we can see in the following diagram:
Figure 3.6 – Cloud-native authentication
Cloud native is mostly used by new organizations or those without an existing directory service. For companies that already have an AD database, it is common to integrate with it, and for this we can use Azure AD Connect.