In the third post on ‘Cloud Journeys’ we take a look at establishing a hybrid IaaS / SaaS cloud that can progress towards pure SaaS in the future.
Some of the road-blocks to mid-size businesses adopting pure SaaS have been discussed in earlier posts, and aside from affordable bandwidth, technology limitations form part of the challenge. As an example, IT managers interested in Azure AD are wondering whether a SaaS version of Active Directory could replace the need for on-premise ‘traditional’ Active Directory. Today, for the most part, the answer is ‘no’, but what does the future hold?
Azure AD, (the Active Directory that comes with your Office 365 tenant) is basically the same as your on-premise Active Directory; but it’s not possible today to extend its controls to your on-premise environment (for example to set ACLs on a File Server). In the future however this is likely to change as Microsoft works to provide new capabilities (such as “Azure AD Domain Services”), and extend the reach of technologies such as Azure domain join (now available in Windows 10).
Business interested in designing their cloud outlay to meet the potential of a growing SaaS future can look to establishing Azure AD today, with a view to expanding its influence (and potentially reducing IaaS and traditional Active Directory in the future).