Microsoft Entra ID Reviews

We are using it for authentication. We are using GPOs for user and computer policies.

The central authentication server is most valuable. GPOs are useful for user and computer policies.

Its price should be improved. It is very expensive for Turkish people.

We have been using Azure Active Directory for about six months. This is a new company, and we started to use new IT solutions. We bought a lot of IT solutions, equipment, and tools. 

It is stable. 

At the end of the project, about 1,200 people will use this solution. We don't have any plans to increase its usage.

We didn't use Microsoft's support. We have mostly Turkish or local solution partners for any help. 

I didn't use any other solution.

It was not easy. It was also not difficult. It took about a month.

We used a solution partner for its deployment. For maintenance, we would have about 10 engineers for 1,200 people.

It is very expensive. Its price should be lower. Price is the most important factor for Turkish people. 

This is the best solution for authorization. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We use Azure Active Directory for quite a few things. We use it for security group management of authorized principals who need access to get SSH-signed certificates for user logins. We use it for automated jot-based (JSON Web Token) self sign-on for our lowest, least privileged credentials on certain products. We also use AAD for B2B coordination of SSO when we're bringing users onto our platform, where they have Active Directory on their side. We use the OIDC-based SSO flows through AAD to merge project-level AADs back to our corporate AAD for internal single sign-on flows.

• There is tech support to help with any OIDC-based setups between organizations.
• It has good support for SAML 2.0 and OIDC-based setups for our remote identity providers.

The solution has come a long way. Now, with the Azure AD B2C offering integrated as well, we've got a full IAM-type solution for our customer-facing identity management. In addition, when it comes to user journeys we now can hook in custom flows for different credential checking and authorizations for specific conditional access. 

I don't think the documentation is where it needs to be yet, for user journeys and that type of flow. There is still trial and error that I would like to see cleaned up.

Also, they do have support for SAML 2.0 and it's very easy to set up linkages to other Active Directory customers. But if somebody is using an IdP or an identity solution other than Active Directory, that's where you have to start jumping through some hoops. So far, our largest customers are all using Active Directory, but I don't think the solution is quite as third-party-centric as Okta or Auth0. Those solutions have a lot of support for all kinds of IdPs you want to link up to.

Finally, a couple of months ago I was on a team that was looking at low-cost MFA for SSO, where we would control the MFA on our side, instead of having the remote database handle it. In those kinds of flows, there aren't as many off-the-shelf options as I would like. There were cost implications, if I recall, to turn on 2FA. Also, the linkages that they had set up off-the-shelf—obviously they had the Authenticator app—meant that if you wanted to do something with Duo Mobile or any of the other popular 2FA providers, it seems it might have taken us more time than we wanted to put into it.

I have been using Azure Active Directory for a couple of years now.

The stability is great.

The scalability is also great.

We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, so we aren't typical folks. Through that agreement, we get a dedicated technical account manager and that person is able to escalate tickets when necessary. I have found Microsoft to be very responsive when needed, although we haven't really needed them that often.

We use Azure a lot, and therefore, AAD was an obvious choice and we thought, "Why not use it?"

They've done a good job on OIDC. That was a pretty simple, seamless setup. We've done that with multiple remote IdPs now, and I don't recall too many issues there.

There is much less cost investment going into it now. We didn't have to do a volume buy to get onto the platform. When it comes to ROI, there is low friction and a high, immediate return on investment.

It's relatively inexpensive in comparison with third-party solutions. It's highly available and supported by Microsoft Azure in our enterprise agreements. With the addition of their B2C tenants, it's hard to beat from a cost perspective now.

They changed their pricing for B2B access. You used to need shared licenses so that, if you were paying for a Premium AAD on your side, that would allow you to have five shared external mapped users. They've blown that all up and it's now dirt cheap. It works out to pennies per user per month, instead of dollars. A P1 user license in their system was $6 per user per month, which is cost-prohibitive for a lot of B2B SSO flows, but now it's down in the pennies range.

I am a systems manager. I use Azure Active Directory every day for my support job.

Our authentication tools to single sign-on portals are hosted in different cloud products, like Amazon or GCP. So, we create an enterprise application and Azure Active Directory to give our users for authentication access to various public URLs.

Before Azure Active Directory, it took effort to provide cloud access to on-premises users. With Azure Active Directory and AD Connect, we are able to sync on-prem users to the cloud with minimal effort. We don't have to manage keeping multiple entities for the same user.

The multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the best aspects of the product. 

The security features are great. They will report in advance to you in the case of suspicious activity. 

The GUI is pretty enhanced. You can configure applications or do whatever they need to do. 

Azure Active Directory currently supports Linux machines. However, the problem is that you get either full or minimal access. It would be very nice if we could have some granular authorization modules in Azure Active Directory, then we could join it to the Linux machine and get elevated access as required. Right now, it is either full or nothing. I would like that to be improved. 

We have the ability to join Windows VMs to Azure. It would be nice if we could have some user logs, statistics, and monitoring with Azure Active Directory.

When we subscribe to MFA, the users get MFA tokens. However, it is not a straightforward process to embed any of the OTP providers. It would be good if Microsoft started embedding other third-party OTP solutions. That would be a huge enhancement.

I have been using Active Directory for two years.

This product is used every second of every day.

The solution offers nice stability and performance. 

In my organization, there might be as many as 60,000 people who utilize the solution. 

The scalability is awesome. You don't even need to think about scalability because Microsoft manages it.

We use it on a daily basis.

The support could be better. Lately, they sort of dropped off a bit in terms of quality. Recently, Microsoft support has not been doing such a good job. Previously, they used to do a good job.

In the past, AD Connect was not syncing. It threw errors in the beginning. So, I had to call up technical support to solve the problem. At the time, we were satisfied with their assistance.

I am also using AWS.

Azure Active Directory is not an Active Directory product. It is just the application proxy. You need to have an on-prem solution. Azure Active Directory would just be a proxy that uses the on-prem data and hosts the application. It is not a full-scale Active Directory solution. However, it has a lot of enhancements. The traditional on-prem Active Directory hosts the users and computers as well as some additional group objects. 

On the other hand, AWS Active Directory has all the capabilities of the traditional Active Directory with limited access for the administrator. All domain administration and sensitive credentials will be managed by AWS. So, you don't need to worry about application delays or syncing issues.  

The initial setup is simple.

It is pretty easy to set up the product. You subscribe in Azure Active Directory. By default, it will have an extension where you need to register. If you need a custom domain name, then you need to register with your public DNS providers to create the DNS public entry. You will then have to prove that you own the domain name. Once it has been proven, then your Active Directory pretty much works. 

If you need to sync up your on-prem users with the Azure Active Directory, then you need to have an AD Connect server installed at the VM-level domain. It should be credentialed so AD Connect can use credentials to read your on-premises and sync it to the cloud. Once this has been done, you are good to go. As an enhancement, for whatever user you are syncing, you can mandate them by adding them to a group or rolling out an MFA policy.

Since it is pretty straightforward, you just need one person to deploy it.

I implemented it in an hour.

Some maintenance is required. However, it is not on Azure Active Directory's part. Rather, it is for AD Connect. Often, we see that the connection is getting lost or something is not happening. Sometimes, port 443 might not be open from your on-prem Azure Active Directory. In that case, if you haven't implemented it in the beginning, then you need to do this. For a high availability solution, if you find that the machine is having additional issues, then you might need a higher AD Connect device. I would probably also deploy it with a different availability.

The solution has three types of tiers:

1. E1 has very basic features. 
2. You get limited stuff in E2 and cannot have Office 360 associated with it. 
3. E3 is on the costly side and has all the features.
   

If you need to have an Exchange subscription or email functionality, then you need to pay more for that.

We are using both the on-premises version and the SaaS version.

I would advise potential new users to learn a bit about the product before jumping in. If you are new, you need to do background research about Azure Active Directory. You also need to understand its purpose and how you want to leverage it. When you have a draft architecture in place, then you can go ahead and implement this solution. If it needs to be reimplemented, it is just a matter of five minutes.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

We have integrated our internal applications and cloud applications with Azure AD. We also have a few external applications for which we need to implement a self-service portal and handle requests such as password reset.

We have external applications such as Cloudspace, and we have integrated Azure AD with Cloudspace. We mainly use a single sign-on. Our main target is to go through all single sign-on applications and integrate them with Azure AD. We also need to audit everything in Office 365. Our mail system is Office 365, and we also do some auditing.

We are also implementing Intune. We have deployed some basic policies for mobile devices, and we are working on improving those policies. We need to configure conditional access and improve policies for the applications and devices. We are doing some testing, and it is in progress.

In terms of deployment, we have a hybrid deployment of Azure AD. We have the 2019 version of AD on-prem.

We are able to do complete onboarding through AD. The users have access through the AD login, which is synced with Azure AD. We have a hybrid environment, and every cloud application is accessed through AD. We have defined AD policies related to password expiration, limitations, etc. It has provided smoother accessibility.

Previously, when we had on-premise AD, to reset their own passwords, users had to use a VPN or bring their laptop to the office. With self-service, users can easily change their passwords. This reduces the workload for IT support. If their password gets locked, they can unlock it themself by using Azure AD. Previously, it was also difficult to integrate with external applications, but with Azure AD, integration with external applications is easier. 

Azure AD makes it easier to see and monitor everything in terms of access. We can see sign-in logs or audit logs, and we can also integrate devices by using Intune. So, we can manage BYOD devices inside the organization.

We are using Conditional Access, MFA, and AIP. We have integrated it with Intune, and we already have DLPs.

Application integration is easy. MFA and password self-service have reduced most of the supportive work of IT. We use multi-factor authentication. Every access from a user is through multi-factor authentication. There is no legacy authentication. We have blocked legacy authentication methods. For people who use the MDM on mobile, we push our application through Intune. In a hybrid environment, users can work from anywhere. With Intune, we can push policies and secure the data. 

The audit logs are very good for seeing everything.

We started using it at the end of last year.

It is stable. I haven't faced any issues. There could be some issues related to syncing because of on-prem, but overall, it is quite stable.

I don't have much experience with scalability. I only use tier one or Premium P1, and I want to move to Premium P2 that has more security levels and more advantages.

In my previous companies, there were a thousand users. In my current company, we have less than 500 users. It is working fine, and there are no issues.

We plan to expand our usage. If it is possible, we plan to upgrade our subscription to Premium P2. We have introduced it to one or two companies who were looking for such a solution. We have already introduced the Azure AD hybrid platform for companies that had only an on-prem setup.

Sometimes, there are issues, but they are usually because of user mistakes. We are able to fix such issues. We are able to find the issue and do troubleshooting. We are able to find information about what is wrong and how to fix it. 

Their support is okay. They are able to resolve the issue, but sometimes, there is a delay because the ticket goes to the wrong person or the wrong time zone. I would rate them an eight or a nine out of 10.

We have only been using Microsoft solutions.

It is easy to deploy and not complex, but it also depends on your requirements. We have tenants and subscriptions, and we connect AD to Azure AD through Azure AD Connect, and they are periodically synced.

The connectivity took a day or two. It doesn't take long. Sometimes, there could be issues with on-prem because of not having a standardized setup or because of parameter duplication, but after we resolve the issues, it doesn't take long. For its setup, only one person is generally required.

It was implemented by me, and I also had one guy's support. 

Our infrastructure team takes care of the maintenance part. They are taking care of monitoring. If there is an alert or something happens, they take care of it. It doesn't require much maintenance. One person can manage it.

We have been able to achieve our target and requirements for security. After the move to Azure AD, the security level is high. The users have to change passwords and do MFA a few times if something goes wrong, and if they can't, the device is going to block them. Sometimes, users are not happy, but at the organizational level, it is good. It is costly, but the improvement is good in terms of performance and security.

It is a packaged license. We have a Premium P1 subscription of Office 365, and it came with that.

Two or three years ago, we were looking at some open-source solutions.

I would rate Azure Active Directory a nine out of 10.

We are using it for all non-structured data and as an identity manager for all of our accounts. In addition, we use it also to authenticate Google services, because we have Google Workspace for email, and to integrate other tools with our services. We are able to keep it all going, balanced, and synchronized. It's very good. We use it for just about everything that we need to do an identity check on.

We couldn't live without the Active Directory services. It has helped to improve our security posture. We have a lot of users and hardware to manage and we can do that with Active Directory.

The most valuable feature is the ability to deploy and make changes to every workstation that I need to. We use it to control policy and I can apply the right policies to all our 1,500 workstations, notebooks, et cetera.

I have been using the Active Directory solution for three years. I'm responsible for almost all infrastructure services in our organization.

It's pretty stable. In the three years, the service has never been down.

As far as I know, it works for 10,000 and 100,000. It's just difficult to find current information, such as how much hardware and how many licenses we would need to keep it going. But it's scalable and works really well. We can keep adding servers and scale up or out.

We don't have another company that provides support for Active Directory. On my team, there are three people who work with it, and we have about 2,000 users in our company.

To be honest, I can barely navigate Microsoft's support. Microsoft is so well-known and there is so much information to look up on the internet, that we have never come to the point where we have actually had to open an issue with Microsoft's team. We can almost always find out the information that we need by looking it up with Google or in Microsoft's Knowledge Base.

We used to use LDAP, a free tool, but since almost all of our hardware needed integration, we had to move to Active Directory. We couldn't apply the policies that we needed, using open source, and we couldn't keep the integration going the way we needed to.

We are really happy with how the functionality Azure Active Directory gives us. I have a security policy applied to all workstations. Before, all of our users could configure their machines the way they wanted to. As a result, we often had to reconfigure and do other things to them as well because the computers were crashing. We almost don't have to do that anymore.

The trick was to immigrate from LDAP. We had to get all the properties from the files into Active Directory, so it took some time. When we did that, there were some issues with the system and we had to do it manually. It would be nice if they had a service that would make it easier to migrate from LDAP to Active Directory, keeping all of the properties from files and non-structured data as well.

It gives a good return on investment. The amount of first-level support we have had to give internally has dropped a lot since we applied the policies and restricted our users. But our users are now more satisfied because their computers don't have the issues that they had before. Before Active Directory, there were many issues that our users complained about, like worms and malware. We don't have those issues anymore. Even with endpoint protection we had some cases of viruses in our company, but now we don't have them either.

Directly, I couldn't calculate the return on investment, but indirectly we saved by reducing work for our team, and we are keeping our users satisfied.

The process for buying licenses from Microsoft is somewhat messy and really hard to do. We have to talk to someone because it's hard to find out how many licenses we need. If I'm applying for 2,000 users, how many Windows licenses do we need?

They could also charge less for support. You buy the license, but if you want to keep it in good standing, you have to pay for the support, and it is expensive. It's okay to pay for the license itself, but to pay so much for support...

We were thinking about buying another tool, to be capable of managing and keeping all the identities within our organization current. But we had to go straight to Microsoft because there are no other solutions that I know of. By now, almost all organizations are using Windows 10 or 11, and it would be hard to achieve the possibilities that we have with Active Directory if we used another service.

We are integrated with NetApp because we use NetApp storage. It's pretty awesome. We are also integrated with many others, such as our data center hardware with storage from IBM. We're using it for logging switches, as well. It works really well.

My advice to others would be to look at the options and focus on how you can pay less. Do the research so that you buy just the essential licenses to keep it going. If you don't do the sizing well, you can buy more, but it's expensive to keep it going and pay for support.

Azure AD is primarily integrated with all of the Microsoft services, such as Microsoft 365, Office 365, and Dynamics 365/Power Apps. Behind the scenes, we are, in one way or another, using Azure AD for our application security, identity management, and to access purpose services. At times, we need to configure some advanced features to provide access and identity to third-party apps to integrate with Dynamic 365. 

Unfortunately, I don't have any numbers and metrics related to organizational improvement off-hand.

That said, using Azure AD app services, we don't have to care about secure access to our Dynamics 365 data. Azure AD performs the authentication on behalf of our application and that's great. We don't have to implement security on our side to secure access for third-party services or third-party software or applications.

Azure B2C has also helped us in providing secure access to the Power Apps portal, or external content.

The app registration services are great. This basically simplifies security in order to give access to third-party apps from within Microsoft services such as Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. We can do this in a very secure manner using the AD. This really very simplifies the identity and access management for us.  

I use Azure B2C for providing access to external users. It was a really great experience to configure Azure AD B2C. I like this feature, as it provides a single sign-on for existing or new users; even new Azure AD users can be provided with sign-ins to our portal.

The solution has features that have helped improve our security posture. For example, without Azure B2C or any third-party identity service like Google or Gmail, we are compelled to store users' credentials and sensitive data in Dynamics 365 contact table somewhere. By using Azure B2C, we are totally independent of this.

The solution hasn’t affected the end-user experience. Usually, users are not so IT aware, so they don't feel an impact related to the change. We know that having secure access for them is important for them and also for us, however, they don’t feel any noticeable difference with the extra security in place.

Honestly speaking, I haven't thought about where areas of improvement might be necessary.

Everything was very smooth every time we used Azure AD. In other Microsoft solutions, we come across some bugs or workarounds, et cetera. However, as far as Azure AD is concerned, or maybe, to the extent that we are using it at least, we haven't come across any issues.

In terms of identity and access management and concerns, all of our needs are provided by the existing implemented features.

I have been using the advanced feature of Azure AD for the last three years or so.

Currently, Azure AD and most of the Azure services are very, very stable. A couple of years ago, I experienced some difficulty in implementing the solutions, the services of Azure AD. In one instance, I was not able to configure Azure AD for a registration. This was two or three years ago. However, currently, the documentation is very clear and there are no loopholes or anything that could hinder even a simple IT administrator to implement these services.

I am just using the product for integration with Dynamics 365 and Power Apps solutions. Right now, we are integrating with Azure AD in a very simple manner. I'm not sure if we plan to expand usage.

In our company, 100 to 200 people are connecting to PowerApps portals using Azure AD B2C.

There are two or three developers right now who use Azure AD for identity and access management purposes. Managers will not be using Azure AD in that it is not used to configure and trigger solutions using Azure.

We haven't used customer support contact up to this point. Everything that we need is already provided through the documentation. So far, we haven't had any need to contact customer support for Azure AD.

We did not use a different solution before we used Azure AD. We only use Microsoft solutions.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The documentation is very good and the steps are very well documented. I remember three years ago I encountered some undocumented feature or maybe a bug when configuring Azure AD for apps registration. However, lately, this is not the case. Currently, the documentation is very up-to-date and very clear, and almost every time I register the user, the apps in Azure AD, and configuration the Azure B2C have helpful documentation. They probably made some form of an update to the system that fixed any past bugs or issues.

The deployment hardly takes 15 to 30 minutes - and that's for app registration. To complete the whole process on the Azure AD side and on our Dynamics 365 side - including Azure B2C - it took, when I implemented it for the first time, one hour to set up everything. That was the first time. Since then, I've gotten faster and it now hardly takes 30 to 40 minutes to configure Azure B2C.

We are an IT company ourselves. A hundred percent of the time we use our own skills and documentation to implement everything related to Azure AD and Dynamics 365 or anything else.

We have seen an ROI due to the fact that it integrates with other Microsoft services very seamlessly. In that sense, it definitely saves time and cost as opposed to implementing something that we don't know, such as other identity systems. 

I don't know much about the pricing. As far as licensing is concerned, there are two options. There is a set of free services that are offered through a free license and if you have a Microsoft tenant or any Microsoft service such as Dynamics 365 or Power Apps, you have access to a free set of services that Azure AD provides. This includes registration and some other items. 

If you want to use Azure AD's advanced features, they are not provided for free. There are two types of premium licenses that are available for anyone who is a registered licensed user.

We did not evaluate different solutions before we chose Azure AD. This is due to the fact that, in the Microsoft ecosystem, Azure AD fits best in terms of providing access and identity management to all of the other Microsoft online services.

We are a Microsoft partner.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. This is an online service. As I'm a Dynamics 365/Power Apps developer, usually I don't bother to check what version of Azure AD is currently hosting on the online services.

I would advise new users, if they are using Microsoft online services, that Azure AD is the best choice for all identity and access management requirements. This is due to the fact that it is in the same ecosystem. It understands the needs of its own vendors much better compared to any other external identity service.

I'd rate the solution a perfect ten out of ten.

We use the Azure portal to create users, assign rights, build policies, etc. I'm not an administrator for that part of our system but that is basically what we use Azure AD for.

Conditional access has helped us to better provide more security for our users and MFA has helped us to provide more security for users who are working from home. They use their own personal devices.

Azure AD has helped us to provide security for applications that I didn't have access to.

This product has improved our overall security posture. Everybody is working from home using a VPN. We recently migrated everybody to MFA, which is required to connect using the VPN. People are now more aware of their passwords and overall, gives them better security.

Using the Self Service Password Reset functionality has helped to improve our end-user experience because they no longer have to deal with the service desk to do so. It also helps the service desk because it relieves them of the need to help users when it comes to password changes, allowing them to focus on other things.

We use all of the services that are offered by Azure AD. We use Azure AD Connect, SSPR, app registration, application proxy, and more. We use everything for different services that include conditional access, authentication methods, etc.

Conditional Access is a helpful feature because it allows us to provide better security for our users.

I would like to see improvements made when it comes to viewing audit logs, sign-in logs, and resource tags.

We have been using Azure Active Directory for approximately six years.

In my opinion, the on-premises deployment is still king with respect to stability.

We are able to control what's happening there, unlike the cloud instances when the service is down. If Azure AD is down then it will affect the ability of our users to log in.

Both Azure AD and the on-premises Active Directory solutions are scalable.

We have approximately 30,000 objects hosted in Azure AD. Usage will be increased as need be, as we have more users and we have more objects to add.

I would rate Microsoft support and eight out of ten.

Support provides access to good resources and good backend tools that we can use to resolve issues.

We migrated to Azure Active Directory from Windows Active Directory.

In my previous organization, I was involved in the implementation and it was very straightforward. It was straightforward in the sense that we didn't encounter any major issues because we were already using Windows Active Directory. The only issue we had was that we had to move people in batches, and not at the same time.

Our deployment took approximately one month.

As part of the implementation strategy, we first moved our Exchange to Office 365. This was the initial migration of users from on-premises to Azure AD. The primary phase was to start using Office 365 for our email instead of Exchange.

We migrated from our on-premises Exchange solution to Azure AD with our in-house team. There are some of us in the infrastructure team, plus my manager.

In terms of our overall Azure experience, I can see that this solution yields a return on our investment. However, it is difficult to quantify.

The cost is billed on a per-user licensing basis.

We did not evaluate any other options.

I think that overall, using Azure AD is very straightforward.

My advice for anybody who is considering Azure AD is to look at the products, understand the role of AD, and see how it works in their environment. Then, before they roll out, test it well.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that it helps with better organization and allocation of rights and security.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We provide single sign-on, app syncing, and API seamless access to more than 2,000 users with the syncs into Azure. We provide access to email, SharePoint Online, Skype, and other services on the cloud to half of those users. We have services in the cloud, such as app registration and documents for SharePoint Online.

The single sign-on is the most valuable aspect of the solution. It allows for storing passwords in secure vaults. For developers, we use a vault for SSH. Mainly, we have replication from all services on-prem to the cloud.

With a single sign-on, in the case something happens on-premises, users can still use a single sign-on to a PC to access the cloud.

We can deploy policies, which improves our security posture. It's mainly very similar to on-premises, however, some new features can be used on the cloud as well, such as labs and password rotation. Some features have improved, which has been great.

The solution improves the way our organization functions. I can deploy a policy that will search for unused accounts, for example, and delete or just move them to a different organization unit that handles unused accounts. We can change unsecured passwords. We can detect intrusion and inform a security group on how to disable that account immediately. We can also perform security checks on services.

We can easily migrate services and improve the quality and improvement of bandwidth of the service. It's easy to scale.

There are some searches, such as a global search, which have powerful query capabilities if you configure it in a certain way.

It's easy to use. The portal experience provides a dashboard of what's happening. With the dashboard, you can see what's happening with the service faster. Of course, I’m talking about the cloud. On-prem you don't have that dashboard.

Active Directory has affected our end-user experience. It has improved it as we have centralized management now and we have centralized administration, and things can be automated easily. You can have most tasks automated. It's good.

The security needs to be improved. For example, in terms of changing from one version to the latest, meaning going from 2008 to 2012, or 2016 to 2019, you need to get rid of all the operating systems and they need to ensure the security is upgraded and improved.

They need to bring BitLocker into the VMs and the servers.

LAPS could also be improved. LAPS are used to rotate passwords on a server. That can be improved upon to increase security levels.

Protocols SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 need to be removed and they should change my TLS 1.2 for every application.

I've been using Azure for about 13 years. However, I've used Active Directory for 25 years. It's been a long time.

We have found some servers do not have enough CPU or memory which meant there was not enough stability. I scaled up the service to ESX, to a virtual host, and I installed multiple DCs, virtualized. As the solution has physical machines, CPU and memory were not enough. However, the scaling provided much more stability.

The scalability is good now, and I find it to be more stable and faster since scaling up to ESX.

We tend to increase usage every month. We have five countries with multiple forests. Currently, we have 200 users or so on the solution.

The technical support is not so bad, however, it's lacking in faster response times sometimes.

We did not previously use a different product.

The initial setup was complex. It has several forests connected to multiple domains in several countries, and it's going through multiple data centers. Typically, we have a solution for the VPN. It's different in every country sometimes. On top of that, centralized services are not so easy to manage in different forests.

The initial deployment was set initially for six months, and then we’ve been doing improvements for the last six months as well. It’s been a year in total.

Our initial implementation strategy was to sync a forest with multiple domains.

We have ten to 15 people who are capable to handle maintenance on the product. These include a cloud architect to Active Directory architect engineers, help desk engineers to deploy and manage solutions, and engineers to manage the servers.

We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment. We handled it in-house. That is my understanding.

We have seen a bit of an ROI.

The solution is not the cheapest in the market. It could be improved and possibly lowered slightly.

We moved right into Active Directory, however, as a cloud architect, I am familiar with other solutions. I advised the client to go right to Active Directory based on my past experience. Due to the complexity of services they offered, I knew integration would be easy.

We are a Microsoft partner.

We use several versions of the product, including 2016 and 2019. For one customer, they're running 2008, which is the old version, and I just upgraded them to 2012. The domain controller is 2012 R2 and has the latest patches.

I'd advise new users to do an original design with an architect, and think about scaling up while considering services you will be adding in the future. It's important to plan the security tightly and do a neat design and consider services such as BitLocker and other resources that will be needed.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.