101: Microsoft Entra ID Domain Services

Overview

Managing identities and guaranteeing safe access in a dispersed environment have become critical as businesses continue to move their IT infrastructures to the cloud. A collection of capabilities provided by Microsoft Entra Domain Services, formerly known as Azure Active Directory Domain Services, can make IT professionals’ work easier while protecting company assets.

Here, I will try to cover the advantages of Microsoft Entra Domain Services, typical use cases, and how IT teams can decide if it’s the best option for them.

Entra ID Domain Services

Microsoft Entra Domain Services is an Azure service fully compatible with Windows Server Active Directory. It offers managed domain services like domain join, group policy, LDAP, and Kerberos/NTLM authentication. Like on-premises Active Directory, this solution assists IT administrators in group policy management of cloud-based virtual machines and applications.

In a nutshell, Domain Services eliminates the administrative hassle of managing your domain controllers by expanding Microsoft Entra ID’s capabilities to offer a wider range of domain services managed from the cloud. It has all of the features and capabilities of Active Directory Domain Services without the added burden of infrastructure management and upkeep!

The following section will discuss the key benefits an organization can get from using Microsoft Entra Domain Services.

Effortless Integration: Domain Services and Microsoft Entra ID have a deep integration that enables businesses to administer authentication services in a hybrid environment using their current Microsoft Entra ID tenant. This makes it simpler to handle user identities and rights in cloud and on-premises settings.

Decreased Infrastructure Complexity: Businesses can do away with on-premises Active Directory by utilizing Domain Services. This lowers the administrative load and hardware expenses related to managing servers and other software.

Enhanced Security: Domain Services are managed by Microsoft and include monitoring, security fixes, and automated updates. By using a managed service architecture, the possibility of security flaws resulting from poorly maintained domain services is decreased.

Scalability: Domain Services is a fully managed service that grows on its own to accommodate your user base and enterprise applications’ needs without the need for manual deployment and maintenance.

When to Use Microsoft Entra Domain Services

Common Scenarios when Microsoft Entra Domain Services can be the best fit for any organization are described below:

• Migration (Lift and Shift) – By managing all the conventional AD-dependent tasks with a managed service, Microsoft Entra Domain Services offers enterprises transferring legacy apps from an on-premises setting to the cloud without having to redesign them a simpler route to the cloud and a path to establishing Microsoft Entra ID as the hub of the identity universe.
• Ease of User Management – Microsoft Entra Domain Services can be very helpful to businesses that need to synchronize on-premises AD with cloud services for smooth user access and single sign-on (SSO).
• Ease of Application Management – Domain Services can streamline access and identity management for businesses creating or implementing applications that need LDAP, Kerberos, or NTLM authentication.

Before making a choice of whether to go with Entra Domain Services or not, there are certain considerations that the organization has to take care of; if all the considerations are well suited to their business goals, then they can decide to migrate their on-premises workload to Azure.

• Use-Case I – Analyse the Existing Infrastructure- If the organization is already utilizing the Entra ID Domain Services and if they want to increase the functionality or extend their cloud capabilities without having to invent extra in On-premises active directory servers, then they are recommended to go ahead with Microsoft Entra Domain Services and use it as a cloud-based solution for any extended features.
• Use-Case II – Domain Services can offer cloud-native support for applications that mostly rely on classic AD technologies like LDAP or Kerberos. This enables businesses to reduce their on-premises footprint by moving those “long-tailed” apps to the cloud.
• Use-Case III – Cutting down on the Budget – If the organization can analyze the total cost of ownership for their on-premises infrastructure and calculate if moving to the cloud will save on the cost, then definitely the organization should choose to go with Entra ID Domain Services.

These are just some of the use cases. However, there can be many such situations in which cloud-based solutions can be the best option for organizations to optimize their infrastructure cost.

Relevant Courses and Certifications

Relevant learnings and cloud certifications related to Entra ID Domain Services are available in Microsoft’s MS Learn documentation. We at CloudThat provide all the cloud-based training (offline or virtual) to help professionals ramp up on such crucial cloud services and use them appropriately to solve their business problems and manage their infrastructure.