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Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support. What is Azure Active Directory?
In this articleAzure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management service. This service helps your employees access external resources, such as Microsoft 365, the Azure portal, and thousands of other SaaS applications. Azure Active Directory also helps them access internal resources like apps on your corporate intranet network, along with any cloud apps developed for your own organization. For more information about creating a tenant for your organization, see Quickstart: Create a new tenant in Azure Active Directory. To learn the differences between Active Directory and Azure Active Directory, see Compare Active Directory to Azure Active Directory. You can also refer Microsoft Cloud for Enterprise Architects Series posters to better understand the core identity services in Azure like Azure AD and Microsoft-365. Who uses Azure AD?Azure AD is intended for:
Microsoft Online business services, such as Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Azure, require Azure AD for sign-in activities and to help with identity protection. If you subscribe to any Microsoft Online business service, you automatically get Azure AD with access to all the free features. To enhance your Azure AD implementation, you can also add paid capabilities by upgrading to Azure Active Directory Premium P1 or Premium P2 licenses. Azure AD paid licenses are built on top of your existing free directory. The licenses provide self-service, enhanced monitoring, security reporting, and secure access for your mobile users.
For more information about associating an Azure subscription to Azure AD, see Associate or add an Azure subscription to Azure Active Directory. For more information about assigning licenses to your users, see How to: Assign or remove Azure Active Directory licenses. Which features work in Azure AD?After you choose your Azure AD license, you'll get access to some or all of the following features for your organization:
TerminologyTo better understand Azure AD and its documentation, we recommend reviewing the following terms.
Next steps
FeedbackSubmit and view feedback for Can companies synchronize users from Active Directory into Azure AD?Simply put, organizations use Azure AD Connect to automatically synchronize identity data between their on-premises Active Directory environment and Azure AD. That way, users can use the same credentials to access both on-premises applications and cloud services such as Microsoft 365.
How does Azure sync with Active Directory?To open Synchronization Service Manager, go to Start menu and type Synchronization Service. It should appear under the Azure AD Connect. In the Synchronization Service Manager console, under Operations tab, you can monitor the synchronization progress.
What can be used to synchronize onAzure AD Connect is used to synchronize user accounts, group memberships, and credential hashes from an on-premises AD DS environment to Azure AD. Attributes of user accounts such as the UPN and on-premises security identifier (SID) are synchronized.
Is it true that a user account in Azure Active Directory can only be assigned one license?Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) provides authentication services for resources hosted in Azure and Microsoft 365. Each user account in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) can be assigned only one license.
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