The most valuable features are
- authentication
- authorization
- two-factor authentication
- I have never had a failure.
It's multi-tenant, residing in multiple locations. Authentication happens quickly. Irrespective of whether I'm in Australia, the US, India, or Africa, I don't see any latency. Those are the good features that I rely on.
It also has a variable extension, which is an added value because in Active Directory, if you have to do a schema, you have to make changes on multiple Active Directory instances. But here, as the extension attribute can be done from the application level, it helps you provide the provisioning.
Another good reason for using Azure AD is that it can connect with other SaaS services. It also has SSOs, which, along with the MFA, makes authentication much easier.
One area where it can improve is connectivity with other systems. Not all systems are connected and you have to do coding to establish a point of connectivity. It supports certain vendors and it supports certain protocols. It is limited in many other aspects at the attribute level.
Also, some of the provisioning filters are not capable enough. You cannot do a date filter on the provisioning.
Perhaps they could also have easy protocols to create the accounts. Instead of just a file upload, they should have an easy connector to do the provisioning part.
I work in a service-based company and I've been using Azure Active Directory for my customers for around 10 years now.
From 2020 to 2022, there have not been more than two or three outages, and none was more than three to four hours long. And those outages may not have occurred the whole time in the entire environment, they may only have been in certain places.
When there is an outage, the end-user experience is affected, but that happens in AWS and in Azure. It happens with any SaaS product. Overall, it has not affected the end-user experience, but when there is an outage in Azure, it will have an impact on our environment.
It's scalable, but if you need more than one region, you have to pay for it. You have to think about how you want the service to be available.
The technical support is good.
The initial setup is easy and straightforward. Setting up Azure AD doesn't require you to do anything. You buy the product from Microsoft and Microsoft sets it up for you. You just establish the connectivity to it. It does not take more than a week or two to complete the setup.
The number of employees you require for deployment and maintenance of the solution depends on how you have set up your provisioning platform. If it is automated, you can have one resource. If you're still in manual, then it depends on the volume of the workload.
Licenses are based on the usage. There is no cap. It's based on the number of users we provision.
A SaaS solution is the best product. You get it at a better price and you have many Windows-based services that are included for free.
I would definitely recommend using Azure AD. Many companies are moving from other vendors to Azure because every company uses Office 365 anyway for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As soon as you use that, by default, you get an Azure AD account. If you have an Azure AD account, you definitely have features to use. Why would you want to go for another product?
Overall, I haven't seen any major issues with the product.