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Road to the cloud: Introduction

  • Article

Some organizations set goals to remove Active Directory and their on-premises IT footprint. Others take advantage of some cloud-based capabilities to reduce the Active Directory footprint, but not to completely remove their on-premises environments.

This content provides guidance to move:

  • From Active Directory and other non-cloud-based services, either on-premises or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), that provide identity management (IDM), identity and access management (IAM), and device management.

  • To Microsoft Entra ID and other Microsoft cloud-native solutions for IDM, IAM, and device management.

Note

In this content, Active Directory refers to Windows Server Active Directory Domain Services.

Transformation must be aligned with and achieve business objectives, including increased productivity, reduced costs and complexity, and improved security posture. To better understand the costs versus value of moving to the cloud, see Forrester TEI for Microsoft Entra ID and Cloud economics.

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