Welcome back! Over the past year I’ve done a number of deep dives into Azure AD authentication, but what is authentication without an identity? They have to get there somehow, right? Gone are the days of legacy protocols such as LDAP or executing a command to a database to provision a local user. Identity as a service offerings such as Azure AD introduce whole new ways to provision users, both manually through the GUI and through programmatic methods such as PowerShell or the Graph API. For this upcoming series of blogs I’m going to cover the many options available with Azure AD and the plusses and minuses of each.

Let’s begin this series by talking about “legacy” tools versus “modern” tools. What do I mean by legacy? Well I mean administrative graphical user interface (GUI) options. Why are administrative GUIs legacy? Well, cloud is primarily about automation, scale, and simplicity. To achieve those ideals, “cloud” services (whether they are IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or IDaaS) must be capable of integrating well with other solutions, whether they be COTS or custom. Pay attention to the word “integration” people. It is more important than ever.

Administrative GUIs represent the old IT where the business had to depend on IT to administer and support its technologies. This was costly in the ways of labor, time, and complexity. The focus on standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) that is happening in the cloud is attempting to streamline this process for the business. These APIs provide a programmatic method of integration with the cloud solutions to take the middle man (IT) out of the equation and put the business users in the driver’s seat. Existing COTs or custom applications can be integrated directly with these APIs to simplify and automate a number of processes that typically fell into IT’s realm.

So what are some examples?

• Scenario: Business user needs to share a document with a partner company

  In the “old” days, the business would have to rely on IT to setup complicated VPN solutions to allow for connectivity and either provision users directly in the identity data store or configure Active Directory trusts. With the standardized APIs emerging in the cloud, an existing identity management system can be directly integrated with an IDaaS API.

  If the business takes advantage of the programmatic access, the business user clicks a button of the person or persons he or she wishes to share the document with, the request goes to an approver such as the data owner, and the provisioning is done automatically by the application. No service requests or multiple day turnarounds from IT required here. The value presented by IT in here was the initial integration, not much else.

• Scenario: Business focuses on application development and a developer requires a new web instance to test code

  In “legacy” IT the developer would need to submit a request to IT to provision a server, install and configure the appropriate middleware, and have security staff verify the server and applications have been configured for compliance. The developer would then need to wait to be provisioned for access as well as deal with the continued maintenance of the web instance. All of this took time and this was time the developer wasn’t developing, which impacts the businesses ability to deliver the product and service they’re in business to deliver.

  We know the value that PaaS provides here, but what about the APIs? Well, envision a service catalog where a developer requests an instance of a web platform that is automatically provisioned and configured to the businesses baseline. Where was IT in this scenario? They setup the initial integration and keep the baselines up to date, and that’s it. Not only does the business save money by needing less IT support staff but its key assets (developers) are able to do what they’ve been hired to do, develop, not submit requests and wait.

In the above two scenarios (and there are oh so many more), we see that IT professionals can no longer focus on a single puzzle piece (server, OS, networking, identity, virtualization, etc), but rather how all of those puzzle pieces fit or “integrate” together to form the solution. Cloud as-a-service offerings made the coffin and simple APIs are the nails sealing the coffin finally putting the “legacy” IT professional to rest.

So why did I spend a blog entry talking about the end of the legacy IT professional? I want you to think about the above as I cover the legacy and modern provisioning methods available in Azure AD. As we explore the methods, you’ll begin to see the importance programmatic access to cloud solutions will play in this cloud evolution and the opportunities that exist for those IT professionals that are willing to evolve along with it.

In my next post to this series I will cover the various GUI methods available for user provisioning in Azure AD.