As the complexity of IT infrastructure increases, organizations have had to adopt newer technologies for security and IT management. Microsoft is one of the leading players in both spaces. As one of the pioneers of the IT revolution, Microsoft has a range of products and services that cater to the requirements of different environments. Unsurprisingly, many of their solutions have intersections confusing customers who need to choose between two or more seemingly similar products or services or their combinations. In this blog on Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) vs Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), we will compare and contrast the two Microsoft offerings and explore how AD FS can work with Azure.<\/p>\n
Before we can differentiate the two offerings let us understand what Active Directory Federated Services and Azure Active Directory are. The answer to what is Azure AD?<\/span><\/a> has been elaborated in a previous article. To summarize, it is an identity and access management solution built on the cloud computing technology to enable users to sign in and access internal resources applications on the corporate network, intranet, and the cloud, as well as external resources such as Office 365 applications and services.<\/p>\n AD FS, on the other hand, is a service that simplifies identity federation and introduces Web single sign-on (SSO) capabilities to enable users to access disparate systems using a single set of credentials. In other words, organizations can extend their existing identity management capabilities to the internet with Azure Active Directory Connect and federation server farms and proxies.<\/p>\n Azure AD and AD FS are fundamentally different from each other in terms of architecture. AD FS is built to work in tandem with on-premises deployments. It can work even without Azure services for identity management. AD FS creates dedicated endpoints with unique IDs for authentication.<\/p>\nHow Azure AD is Different from AD FS?<\/h2>\n