Azure AD Domain Services: A Managed Domain Service for Azure

It is now critical to manage identities and provide safe access in a distributed environment as businesses move more and more of their IT infrastructures to the cloud. IT professionals’ jobs can be made easier and company resources can be secured with the help of Microsoft Entra Domain Services, formerly known as Azure Active Directory Domain Services.
We’ll go over the advantages of Microsoft Entra Domain Services, typical use scenarios, and how IT teams can decide if it’s the best option for them in this blog article.

What Are Microsoft Entra ID Domain Services?

Managed domain services that are completely compatible with Windows Server Active Directory, including domain join, group policy, LDAP, and Kerberos/NTLM authentication, are offered by Microsoft Entra Domain Services. With the use of group policy, this service assists IT administrators in managing cloud-based virtual machines and apps in a way akin to that of on-premises Active Directory.

By offering a wider range of cloud-managed domain services, Domain Services fundamentally expands Microsoft Entra ID’s capabilities and lowers the administrative burden associated with maintaining your own domain controllers. It has all of the attributes and capabilities of Active Directory Domain Services without the extra burden of infrastructure management and upkeep!

Benefits of Microsoft Entra ID Domain Services to Organisations

Flawless Integration: Domain Services and Microsoft Entra ID have a deep integration that enables businesses to handle authentication services in a hybrid environment by utilizing their current Microsoft Entra ID tenant. This implies that managing user identities and permissions in cloud and on-premises environments will be simpler.

Simplified Infrastructure: Organizations can do away with on-premises Active Directory by utilizing Domain Services. This lowers the cost of hardware, and the administrative work involved in keeping up with extra software and physical servers.

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

Business continuity and Disaster recovery: Domain Services’ integrated high availability and disaster recovery features make sure that your identity management system keeps running even in the face of unforeseen disruptions.

When to Use Mic Entra?

Legacy Application Migration: Microsoft Entra Domain Services offers an easier route to the cloud and toward making Microsoft Entra ID the hub of the identity universe by handling all the traditional AD-dependent functions with a managed service. This is useful for businesses transferring legacy applications from an on-premises environment to the cloud without redesigning them.

Identity Management: Microsoft Entra Domain Services can be very helpful to businesses that need to synchronize their on-premises AD with cloud services to enable single sign-on (SSO) and seamless user access.

Some of the other benefits that enterprises get from Entra Domain services are:

• A commercial application that requires Kerberos to operate on a server.
• A cloud product that requires Kerboros in order to operate, like MSIX app attach on Azure Virtual Desktop.
• An entity seeking to integrate its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) servers with a custom domain service while utilizing group policies for secure configuration and management.
• The synchronization of password hashes from an on-premises environment to the cloud could raise security or regulatory concerns.

Pricing

Depending on the functionality and service level needed, Microsoft Entra Domain Services (previously Azure AD Domain Services) offers three primary pricing tiers:
Standard: Price per hour/set: $0.15
Features: Managed domain services that are basic and appropriate for smaller environments.
Enterprise: $0.40 per hour or set
Features: It is perfect for medium-sized environments because it has extra features including trusts, more sync choices, and replicas.
Premium: $1.60 per hour or set
capabilities: Provides all the capabilities found in the Enterprise tier in addition to improved scalability and performance for big environments12.
For high availability, each instance has two domain controllers dispersed across two availability zones (if accessible in the region). An IP address and a standard load balancer are deployed as part of the hourly fee.

Limitations of Entra ID Domain Services

• No on-premises GPO replication
• No Azure AD Hybrid Join
• Absence of Schema extension
• Not a Trust for Forests
• Not accessible from outside the virtual network where it was installed. For Azure settings that are spread geographically, peering or replica sets are necessary.
• No support for MSIX app attachments LDAP write back only inside the controlled domain; AD or AAD cannot be updated.

Learn More Skills on Microsoft Entra Domain Services

Microsoft provides multiple certification courses, in which Microsoft Entra ID Domain Services is discussed with respect to security, identity management, virtual desktop and Migration. The details on each of these courses is available on MS Learn Documentations of Microsoft.

Conclusion

You can still serve enterprise, on-premises line of business apps with Azure Active Directory Domain Services if they need features that Azure AD is unable to offer. It’s critical to realize that a single Active Directory product is probably insufficient.

IT teams can optimize their identity management and security procedures by using Microsoft Entra Domain Services with knowledge of these factors, which will help them make well-informed judgments. Leveraging these cutting-edge services as cloud technologies develop strengthens your organization’s digital security posture and improves operational efficiency.

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